Developers from PowerVR were noted as authors of articles about Pixel Shaders 3.0 and Vertex Shaders 3.0 in an upcoming book dedicated to 3D graphics. This may mean that PowerVR is still in the graphics business and will launch something massive and powerful possibly this year, as noted by Beyond3D.

The book “ShaderX2” covers many topics related to 3D graphics from rendering certain specific effects to DirectX 9.0 HLSL programming. What is definitely interesting to note that there are four contributions from the PowerVR employees: “Deferred Shading with Multiple Render Targets”, “Introduction to the vs_3_0 and ps_3_0 Shader Models”,  “Cloth Animation with Pixel and Vertex Shader 3.0” and “Rendering Voxel Objects with ps_3_0”.

There is no point for employees of a hardware company to write articles about things that have nothing to do with reality. I believe that PowerVR personnel have already started to promote techniques that will be implemented in the next-generation hardware from the company.

Last year I heard that PowerVR cancelled the development of its Kyro III and derivatives, but decided to go on with the so-called Series 5 of its graphics processors. Considering the topics covered by the mentioned articles we can assume that the PowerVR Series 5 chips will support Pixel Shader 3.0 and Vertex Shader 3.0  in hardware. In case the chip is physically launched in 2003, PowerVR may be in a position to offer the first graphics processor with Pixel Shader 3.0 and Vertex Shader 3.0 support. At least, last year an official from the company said that they would launch its Series 5 GPU this year.

We still do not know anything about manufacturing technology, manufacturing partner and performance of the chip. It may be very capable, but a bit slow, in this case it will hardly become successful and we will have to wait for its second revision with boosted speed, just like it happened in 2000 and 2001 with the Kyro and Kyro II. Furthermore, ATI Technologies and NVIDIA Corporation certainly do not want their partners to manufacture graphics cards based on graphics chips from third parties, so, there is a bunch of work for marketing people from PowerVR.

Read the whole topic on the matter with loads of assumptions over here at Beyond3D.