Imagination Technologies Readies Discrete GPGPU PCIe Card

Imagination Technologies is about to launch a PC graphics card, of sorts, even though it hasn't actually done anything in this field for many years.

The company is building on a bet it made last year, when it bought Caustic Graphics.

Caustic actually managed to design FPGA chips that they used for the creation of accelerators capable of real-time ray tracing.

After it got bought, Caustic kept on preparing the market for this technology, finally seeing success at CES 2012, or so reports say.

If Imagination Technologies impresses enough people with the upcoming PowerVR Discrete GPGPU PCIe Cards (second half of 2012), it could become a competitor to NVIDIA's Quadro and Tesla GPU compute accelerators.

Don't be fooled by the photo, though. As others will tell you, that's just the last PowerVR ever sold, a really old board that used to compete with NVIDIA GeForce 3 and AMD Radeon 8500 adapters.