Journal of Xidian University

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Energy consumption estimation for 3D graphics rendering

XING Lidong1,2;LI Tao2;HUANG Hucai2;HAN Jungang2   

  1. (1. School of Microelectronics, Xidian Univ., Xi'an 710071, China;
    2. School of Electronic Engineering, Xi'an Univ. of Posts and Telecommunications, Xi'an 710121, China)
  • Received:2016-08-12 Online:2017-08-20 Published:2017-09-29
  • About author:邢立冬(1980-),男,西安电子科技大学博士研究生,E-mail:zmy_xld@163.com

Abstract:

From the perspective of hardware design and graphics programming, a new energy consumption estimation model of 3D graphics rendering is proposed. Aiming at the energy consumption of the vertex shader and pixel shader in the 3D rendering pipeline, the loads of the vertex shader and the pixel shader which affect the rendering quality are analyzed, and the model of the ratio the number of pixels to the number of vertexes is obtained. At the same time, the energy consumption of vertex shading stages and pixel shading stages are modeled. The model is used to estimate the energy consumption of the benchmark programs, and simulations are performed using the Synopsys VCS simulator and the Power Compiler to obtain the actual energy consumption of these programs. The results show that the geometric mean of the model's prediction error is less than 3%, which can be used to guide the power consumption analysis and management of graphics hardware and software.

Key words: 3D graphics rendering, energy consumption estimation model, shader, prediction error