Toward energy-aware balancing of mobile graphics

Abstract

In the area of computer graphics the design of hardware and software has primarily been driven by the need to achieve maximum performance. Energy efficiency was usually neglected, assuming that a stable always-on power source was available. However, the advent of the mobile era has brought into question these ideas and designs in computer graphics since mobile devices are both limited by their computational capabilities and their energy sources. Aligned to this emerging need in computer graphics for energy efficiency analysis we have setup a software framework to obtain power measurements from 3D scenes using off-the-shelf hardware that allows for sampling the energy consumption over the power rails of the CPU and GPU. Our experiments include geometric complexity, texture resolution and common CPU and GPU workloads. The goal of this work is to combine the knowledge obtained from these measurements into a prototype energy-aware balancer of processing resources. The balancer dynamically selects the rendering parameters and uses a simple framerate-based dynamic frequency scaling strategy. Our experimental results demonstrate that our power saving framework can achieve savings of approximately 40%.