IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications
Frame-based dynamic voltage and frequency scaling for a MPEG decoder
Proceedings of the 2002 IEEE/ACM international conference on Computer-aided design
Reducing Multimedia Decode Power using Feedback Control
ICCD '03 Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Computer Design
A Formal Approach to Frequent Energy Adaptations for Multimedia Applications
Proceedings of the 31st annual international symposium on Computer architecture
Dynamic voltage scheduling with buffers in low-power multimedia applications
ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems (TECS)
Control theory-based DVS for interactive 3D games
Proceedings of the 45th annual Design Automation Conference
Multimedia power management on a platter: from audio to video & games
MM '08 Proceedings of the 16th ACM international conference on Multimedia
Proceedings of the 2008 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design
Rank based dynamic voltage and frequency scaling fortiled graphics processors
CODES/ISSS '10 Proceedings of the eighth IEEE/ACM/IFIP international conference on Hardware/software codesign and system synthesis
Power gating strategies on GPUs
ACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization (TACO)
International Journal of Adaptive, Resilient and Autonomic Systems
Managing power for closed-source Android OS games by lightweight graphics instrumentation
Proceedings of the 11th Annual Workshop on Network and Systems Support for Games
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Graphics-intensive computer games are no longer restricted to high-performance desktops, but are also available on a variety of portable devices ranging from notebooks to PDAs and mobile phones. Battery life has been a major concern in the design of both the hardware and the software for such devices. Towards this, dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) has emerged as a powerful technique. However, the showcase application for DVFS algorithms so far has largely been video decoding, primarily because it is computationally expensive and its workload exhibits a high degree of variability. This paper investigates the possibility of applying DVFS to interactive computer games, which to the best of our knowledge has not been studied before. We show that the variability in the workload associated with a popular First Person Shooter game like Quake II is significantly higher than video decoding. Although this variability makes game applications an attractive candidate for DVFS, it is unclear if DVFS algorithms can be applied to games due to their interactive (and hence highly unpredictable) nature. In this paper, we show using detailed experiments that (surprisingly) interactive computer games are highly amenable to DVFS. Towards this we present a novel workload characterization of computer games, based on the game engine for Quake II. We believe that our findings might potentially lead to a number of innovative DVFS algorithms targeted towards game applications, exactly as video decoding has motivated a variety of schemes for DVFS.