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Kahawai: High-Quality Mobile Gaming Using GPU Offload

Published: 18 May 2015 Publication History

Abstract

This paper presents Kahawai1, a system that provides high-quality gaming on mobile devices, such as tablets and smartphones, by offloading a portion of the GPU computation to server-side infrastructure. In contrast with previous thin-client approaches that require a server-side GPU to render the entire content, Kahawai uses collaborative rendering to combine the output of a mobile GPU and a server-side GPU into the displayed output. Compared to a thin client, collaborative rendering requires significantly less network bandwidth between the mobile device and the server to achieve the same visual quality and, unlike a thin client, collaborative rendering supports disconnected operation, allowing a user to play offline - albeit with reduced visual quality.
Kahawai implements two separate techniques for collaborative rendering: (1) a mobile device can render each frame with reduced detail while a server sends a stream of per-frame differences to transform each frame into a high detail version, or (2) a mobile device can render a subset of the frames while a server provides the missing frames. Both techniques are compatible with the hardware-accelerated H.264 video decoders found on most modern mobile devices. We implemented a Kahawai prototype and integrated it with the idTech 4 open-source game engine, an advanced engine used by many commercial games. In our evaluation, we show that Kahawai can deliver gameplay at an acceptable frame rate, and achieve high visual quality using as little as one-sixth of the bandwidth of the conventional thin-client approach. Furthermore, a 50-person user study with our prototype shows that Kahawai can deliver the same gaming experience as a thin client under excellent network conditions.

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cover image ACM Conferences
MobiSys '15: Proceedings of the 13th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services
May 2015
516 pages
ISBN:9781450334945
DOI:10.1145/2742647
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 18 May 2015

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Author Tags

  1. code offload
  2. computer games
  3. gpu
  4. mobile devices

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  • National Science Foundation

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MobiSys '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 29 of 219 submissions, 13%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 274 of 1,679 submissions, 16%

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  • (2024)Theia: Gaze-driven and Perception-aware Volumetric Content Delivery for Mixed Reality HeadsetsProceedings of the 22nd Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services10.1145/3643832.3661858(70-84)Online publication date: 3-Jun-2024
  • (2024)Improving Resource and Energy Efficiency for Cloud 3D through Excessive Rendering ReductionProceedings of the Nineteenth European Conference on Computer Systems10.1145/3627703.3650064(317-332)Online publication date: 22-Apr-2024
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  • (2023)Safe and Practical GPU Computation in TrustZoneProceedings of the Eighteenth European Conference on Computer Systems10.1145/3552326.3567483(505-520)Online publication date: 8-May-2023
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