FCM: Towards fine-grained GPU power management for closed source mobile games

Contemporary mobile platforms employ embedded graphic processing units (GPUs) for graphics-intensive games, and dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) policies are used to save energy without sacrificing quality. However, current GPU DVFS policies result in unnecessary power waste due to defective workload estimations of embedded GPUs during game play. In this paper, we propose the Frame-Complexity Model (FCM), a fine-grained estimation of the GPU workload in a game frame, to quantify the GPU workload with the real runtime demand for GPU computing resources of a game frame. In FCM, three constituents of a game frame (i.e., structure, textures and computation) are quantified without modification of mobile games. Preliminary experiments show that, compared with the default policy, the FCM-directed GPU DVFS policy can reduce more power consumption of games (11.3% to 25.8%) with good Quality of Service (QoS).