Adaptive CPU Scheduling to Conserve Energy in Real-Time Mobile Graphics Applications

Graphics rendering on mobile devices is severely restricted by available battery energy. The frame rate of real-time graphics applications fluctuates clue to continual changes in the LoD, visibility and distance of scene objects, riser interactivity; complexity of lighting and animation, and many other factors. Such frame rate spikes waste precious battery energy. We introduce an adaptive CPU scheduler that predicts the applications workload from frame to frame and allocates just enough CPU cycles to render the scene at a target rate of 25 FPS. Since the applications workload needs to be re-estimated whenever the scenes LoD changes, we integrate our CPU scheduler with LoD management. To further save energy; we try to render scenes at the lowest LoD at which the user does not see visual artifacts on a given screen. Our integrated Energy-efficient Adaptive Real-time Rendering (EARR) heuristic reduces energy consumption by up to 60% while maintaining acceptable image duality at interactive frame rates.