Optimizing power consumption of mobile games

Abstract

In this paper we aim to optimize power consumption of mobile games without compromising user experience. We study the behavior of 40 mobile games on a smartphone and identify two power-inefficient issues: 1) fixed high frame rate that consumes a high power but brings negligible extra benefits to user experience when the screen content does not change rapidly or stays nearly static, and 2) high overdraw rate---the same pixels are drawn for multiple times and thus wastes energy. We report the measurement results of our study and explore possible solutions to mitigate these two issues. In particular, for the first issue, we have implemented a prototype to enable dynamic frame rate scaling that is able to reduce the frame rate to save power based on how fast the game content changes. A lower frame rate is used when the game content does not change fast and thus user-perceived experience is retained. Preliminary experimental results show that our approach is promising.