Here at Imagination, we are committed to giving developers, silicon vendors, and OEMs full control over their graphics software. By embracing open source, we enable our partners to tailor, extend, and maintain their software stacks independently, free from the constraints of proprietary solutions.  For our partners in markets like automotive, industrial, and internet of things, where hardware lifecycles often span over a decade, we want to give developers the ability to design and support their own software stacks well into the future.

To this end, three years ago, we launched an open-source driver project that would provide the developer community with a flexible and fully featured graphics driver stack for PowerVR GPUs.  The latest milestones for our project have been the upstreaming of our Linux kernel driver and contributing our Vulkan 1.2 code to Mesa.

The PowerVR open-source software stack

At the time of our last announcement on this topic, our initial driver was only capable of running basic applications like the Sascha Willems triangle example on the GX6520 – there was still a long journey to go!

Since then, our engineering team have continued to develop the Vulkan user-mode driver and we are pleased to confirm that with the release of Mesa 25.3 the developer community will have access to our latest, fully functional open-source Vulkan driver.  This operates alongside a kernel mode driver in the Linux Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem which allows developers to create advanced 3D graphics. Updates to this kernel mode driver have been upstreamed with Linux 6.16, and support for an additional IMG core is coming in the 6.18 kernel.

In addition to this, we have been making steady progress with conformance testing such that in August 2025 the IMG BXS GPU joined the IMG AXE GPU in passing Khronos’ Vulkan 1.0 test suite with the open-source driver. The Vulkan 1.2 submissions will also follow in early 2026.

OurVulkan driver running various graphics workloads on a BeaglePlay board which features a Texas Instruments AM62 SoC with an IMG AXE-1-16 inside

Our open-source driver now supports the following Imagination GPUs:

• IMG AXE-1-16 – a highly area efficient GPU that is found in Texas Instrument’s AM62 SoC and is ideal for applications such as industrial HMI, retail automation and driver monitoring systems.
• IMG BXS-4-64 – the smallest core in our latest generation of functionally safe GPUs, found in SoCs like Texas Instrument’s AM68 for smart vision camera applications.

“Imagination is committed to giving our customers and the open-source community what they need to succeed,” says Horea Pop, EVP of Software Development at Imagination, “We carefully designed this driver from the ground-up and we do not plan on stopping here; we will continue to expand our open-source driver to support more Imagination GPUs and API variants.”

Imagination’s development team announcing our latest open-source driver updates at XDC 2025 in Vienna, Austria

Of course, the development of our open-source driver is separate to that of our proprietary driver development kits (DDKs) which remain available to Imagination IP licensees. These DDKs follow a regular release schedule which provide customers with timely support for new operating systems, API versions and API extensions that offer valuable functionality and focus on getting the maximum performance out of the PowerVR hardware. As an example, the latest release carried support for Android 16 and Vulkan 1.4.

Download links for the open-source GPU drivers along with tools and development kits to aid graphics development on PowerVR GPUs can be found on our Developer website.