Imagination Technologies is making its most credible push yet toward mainstream PC gaming. The UK-based GPU IP company has published a long-term roadmap for PowerVR graphics in desktop, workstation, and cloud environments, backed by a DirectX 11 demo running on real DXD silicon. Its Chinese licensees—including Chongqing-based Xiangdixian Computing Technology—have already shipped PowerVR-based desktop GPUs, though with uneven results. Whether DXD can close the gap between specification and real-world gaming performance remains the central question for the architecture’s next chapter.
Imagination Technologies has published its clearest roadmap yet for desktop, workstation, and cloud graphics, describing the work as “essential for mainstream PC gaming.” A DirectX 11 demo running on real DXD silicon—showing 3DMark Fire Strike executing on the DXD GPU IP—marks the company’s first concrete public evidence that the architecture handles modern PC workloads on production hardware.
IMG’s history in PC graphics stretches back over three decades. Its PowerVR architecture powered some of the earliest consumer 3D accelerators and drove the Sega Dreamcast in 1999. The company then shifted almost entirely to mobile, supplying GPU IP to Apple from 2007 to 2017. Apple’s abrupt exit from that relationship forced a strategic reset, and in 2020 IMG launched its B-Series GPU IP—a repositioning toward a broader licensing model. That IP became the foundation for Chinese desktop GPU makers including Moore Threads and Innosilicon, which marketed their cards as domestically developed despite the PowerVR IP underneath. IMG confirmed the relationship publicly in 2022.
DXD, announced in 2023, is the first GPU IP architecture IMG has built explicitly for desktop, laptop, and cloud gaming since the Kyro architecture in 2002. The key advance over the prior D Series is hardware-based DirectX support, which addresses the most consistent complaint about Chinese PowerVR-based cards: poor compatibility with PC gaming titles, particularly newer releases. DXD builds on D-Series hardware DirectX foundations and extends them. The Fire Strike demo demonstrates DX11 execution on real silicon, not simulation.
Xiangdixian Computing Technology
One of IMG’s principal licensees is Xiangdixian Computing Technology, founded in September 2020 in Chongqing, China, by Tang Zhimin—a semiconductor veteran who previously worked at Loongson Technology and Hygon Information Tech. Xiangdixian shipped two GPU generations on PowerVR IP.
Its first-generation Pangu delivered 2,048 compute cores, up to 16 GB GDDR6, 4.8 TFLOPS FP32, 19.2 TOPS AI compute, 153.6 GP/s fill rate, and PCIe 4.0 x16. It supported Arm, x86, LoongArch, and RISC-V CPU architectures, and included vGPU virtualization. The second-generation Tianjun-2 trimmed the spec to 1,024 cores, up to 8 GB GDDR6, 2.6 TFLOPS FP32, 9.2 TOPS AI, 128 GB/s bandwidth, and 83.2 GP/s fill rate, with four independent 4K outputs and AVS2/H.264/H.265 4K60 decode support.
Neither generation reached mass production. In August 2024, Xiangdixian dismissed over 400 employees after shareholders—including the state-owned Jiangsu Zhongde Services Trade Industry Investment Fund—sued the company. A court froze its bank account after it failed to fulfil terms agreed to in a prior funding round. Separately, shareholders sued Tang Zhimin personally, alleging he failed to raise promised Series B financing. The company denied full dissolution and stated it was restructuring and seeking new investors, but its status remained precarious through late 2024. At its peak, Xiangdixian carried a valuation of 15 billion yuan (US $2.1 billion).
IMG’s roadmap commitment takes on added context here. The most prominent Chinese PowerVR licensee built hardware that never reached volume production, and the company behind it faces potential collapse. If DXD is to gain market traction, it needs licensees with the engineering depth, driver capability, and financial stability that Xiangdixian lacked.
What do we think?
The DXD DX11 demo on production silicon represents genuine progress—but DX11 in 2026 is table stakes, not a competitive threshold. The PC gaming market demands DX12 Ultimate, ray tracing, and driver stability across a catalog of thousands of titles. IMG’s roadmap points in the right direction, and its willingness to name PC gaming as the target is a meaningful step. Xiangdixian’s collapse illustrates what happens when licensees ship hardware without the software ecosystem to match. The unnamed new partners IMG references are the story now.
IMG’s DXD roadmap represents a potential inflection point for the non-Nvidia, non-AMD GPU segment—not because IMG alone can disrupt the duopoly, but because a credible third source of PC GPU IP changes the strategic options for Chinese and other sovereign GPU programs. Every Chinese GPU maker currently depends on Western IP, whether they acknowledge it or not. If DXD reaches DX12 parity with mature driver support, it creates a licensable foundation for the next generation of domestic GPU efforts—and gives governments outside the US a viable path to GPU independence.
LIKE WHAT YOU’RE READING? TELL YOUR FRIENDS; WE DO THIS EVERY DAY, ALL DAY.