Mobile GPU Power Consumption Reduction via Dynamic Resolution and Frame Rate Scaling

The emerging industry trend of ever-increasing display density on mobile devices has dramatically increased workload placed on a mobile GPU’s. Because mobile GPU power consumption increases almost linearly with workload, increasing the display density directly de-creases battery life of a device. While this tradeoff is ac-ceptable if user experience is improved, display densities beyond that which the human eye can perceive would re-sult in decreased device battery life for no perceptible gain. Further, the workload imposed by such high den-sity displays may invalidate the previous requirement that the interface always run at high frame rates.

In this paper, we show that the display on some modern devices already exceeds human perceptive capabilities, a feature which can be exploited at runtime in order to re-duce GPU power consumption. Our proposed method in-cludes both resolution and refresh rate scaling, which are shown to reduce mobile GPU power consumption by up to 33% and 38%, respectively. We conclude with a dis-cussion of how such a system may be implemented on existing devices.