Texture-Directed Mobile GPU Power Management for Closed-Source Games

Power consumption and battery life constrain the developments of the mobile platforms. Among the mobile applications, games are the most demanding applications in terms of both computational cost and consumed energy. The power consumption spent on GPU to accelerate the rendering speed keeps increasing rapidly. Most of the GPU power saving techniques using the prediction-based GPU DVFS policies. We propose the Texture-Directed Mobile GPU DVFS policy based on the observation that GPU workloads and texture operations in CPU are strongly positively correlated when playing games. The proposed policy utilizes the texture operations collected from the front-end of the graphic pipeline to scale the GPU frequency. The evaluation results show that, compared with the prediction-based policy, our policy saves more power in the tested games with competitive performance. Up to 43.75% GPU power consumption is saved in the games whose scenes change drastically. About 7.16% power is saved on average in games whose scenes change gently.