Having grown up as a gamer in the era of the leap from 16bit graphics to polygon-based 3D rendering, I feel a significant swell of joy whenever the consumer-grade standard is demonstrated. The revealing of new eye-candy capabilities have a way of bringing me back to the first high-profile “computer graphics look real” media cycle in 2001 when Toronto daily newspapers started to publish stories about the Final Fantasy movie. It’s a thrill that has diminished over the years, as the greatest improvements seem slighter and can only run on industry-grade machines.

Vivante has reignited the spark, however, with the demonstration of OpenGL ES 3.0 at last week’s DESIGNS West conference in San Jose. Running Basemark ES 3.0 technology on Freescale Semiconductor's (News - Alert) i.MX6Q Application Processor with Vivante's GPU, the instance marked the first time that real embedded silicon has been able to run at this high industry standard.

Vivante supplies high performance GPUs to a wide variety of products, from smartphones, tablets and HDTVs, to in-vehicle reference platforms.

Basemark 3.0 was first showcased by Rightware last August at SIGGRAPH 2012. It exists to allow OpenGL ES adopters to fully test the capabilities of their product’s implementations before sending them to a market. Considered then to be the future API standard for mobile platforms, and offering photorealistic game tests to benchmark products, offering embedded silicon that can run it is no small feat for Vivante.

In plain English, this news means that the new chipset makes certain rendering processes, especially the ones that seem redundant, either faster or non-existent. In the press release announcing this ,  Vivante attributes the smooth performance of Basemark on a variety of offered features. The OpenGL ES 3.0 can render multiple instances of a mesh or an object (say, buildings, trees, anything that repeats in a scene) with only a single call, and the same goes for particle effects like smoke. By using previously called rendering information to create on and off screen effects, it simply frees up time to call on now objects and textures.

Vivante is using this benchmark to leverage all of its OpenGL ES 3.0 products, offering clients an opportunity to stay at the forefront of API technology. It is an important position to be in, as the critical eye of the user is always adapting to the new standard, and what once were breathtaking graphical capabilities are always quickly thereafter scrutinized as old. Offering the best when it comes to GPU means offering longer product life.