At each new generation the growing computing power of mobile devices has promoted the adoption of more powerful support for graphics and real-time physics simulations with increasing precision and realism. Given the b...
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At each new generation the growing computing power of mobile devices has promoted the adoption of more powerful support for graphics and real-time physics simulations with increasing precision and realism. Given the battery-operated and handheld nature of these devices they must use as little energy as possible, because it is crucial to enlarge battery life and to keep a comfortable surface touch temperature. Hence, software and hardware improvements are crucial to deliver a low-power yet rich user experience that satisfies the user demands on the functionality of mobile devices. The goal of this thesis is to propose novel and effective techniques to eliminate redundant computations that waste energy and are performed in real-time computer graphics applications, with special focus on mobile GPU micro-architecture. Improving the energy-efficiency of CPU/GPU systems is not only key to enlarge their battery life, but also allows to increase their performance because, to avoid overheating above thermal limits, SoCs tend to be throttled when the load is high for a large period of time. Prior studies pointed out that the CPU and especially the GPU are the principal energy consumers in the graphics subsystem, being the off-chip main memory accesses and the processors inside the GPU the primary energy consumers of the graphics subsystem. In the first place, we focus on reducing redundant fragment processing computations by means of improving the culling of hidden surfaces. During real-time graphics rendering, objects are processed by the GPU in the order they are submitted by the CPU, and occluded surfaces are often processed even though they will end up not being part of the final image. When the GPU realizes that an object or part of it is not going to be visible, all activity required to compute its color and store it has already been performed. We propose a novel architectural technique for mobile GPUs, Visibility Rendering Order (VRO), which reorders objects front-to-bac
Smartphones have become powerful computing systems able to carry out complex tasks, such as web browsing, image processing and gaming, among others. Graphics animation applications such as 3D games represent a large p...
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ISBN:
(纸本)9781450340342
Smartphones have become powerful computing systems able to carry out complex tasks, such as web browsing, image processing and gaming, among others. Graphics animation applications such as 3D games represent a large percentage of downloaded applications for mobile devices and the trend is towards more complex and realistic scenes with accurate 3D physics simulations, like those in laptops and desktops. collisiondetection (CD) is one of the main algorithms used in any physics kernel. However, real-time highly accurate CD is very expensive in terms of energy consumption and this parameter is of paramount importance for mobile devices since it has a direct effect on the autonomy of the system. In this work, we propose an energy-efficient, high-fidelity CD scheme that leverages some intermediate results of the rendering pipeline. It also adds a new and simple hardware block to the GPU pipeline that works in parallel with it and completes the remaining parts of the CD task with extremely low power consumption and more speed than traditional schemes. Using commercial Android applications, we show that our scheme reduces the energy consumption of the CD by 99.8% (i.e., 448 X times smaller) on average. Furthermore, the execution time required for CD in our scheme is almost three orders of magnitude smaller (600 X speedup) than the time required by a conventional technique executed in a CPU. These dramatic benefits are accompanied by a higher fidelity CD analysis (i.e., with finer granularity), which improves the quality and realism of the application.
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