On Balancing Energy Consumption, Rendering Speed, and Image Quality on Mobile Devices

Abstract

Mobile games and graphics are popular because un-tethered computing is convenient and ubiquitous entertainment is compelling. However, rendering graphics on mobile devices faces challenges due to limited system resources, such as battery energy, and low memory and disk space. Real time frame rates, low energy consumption and high image quality are all desirable attributes of interactive mobile graphics; however, achieving these objectives is conflicting. For instance, increasing mesh resolutions improves rendered image quality but consumes more battery energy. Therefore, the authors propose a mobile graphics heuristic to minimize energy consumption while maintaining acceptable image quality and interactive frame rates. Over the lifetime of a mobile graphics application, scene complexity, animation paths, user interactivity and other elements all change its CPU and resource demands. In this regard, a heuristic that dynamically changes scene mesh LoDs and amount of CPU timeslices allotted to the mobile graphics application is presented to select optimal operating conditions that balance rendering speed, energy conservation and image quality. Additionally, a workload predict model is proposed so that the heuristic can monitor both application workload and the availability of resources of mobile devices periodically, while adaptively determining how much resources will be allocated to applications.