Games are up for DVFS

Graphics-intensive computer games are no longer restricted to highperformance 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 unc...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: DAC
• Authors: Yan Gu, Samarjit Chakraborty, Wei Tsang Ooi
• Keywords: DAC 2006, Design Automation, Graphics Workload Characterization, Variability Makes Game, Video Decoding