Dynamic Sampling Rate: Harnessing Frame Coherence in Graphics Applications for Energy-Efficient GPUs

TL;DR

This paper introduces Dynamic Sampling Rate (DSR), a hardware mechanism that leverages scene spatial frequencies and temporal coherence to reduce redundant fragment sampling, significantly improving energy efficiency in real-time graphics rendering.

Contribution

The paper presents DSR, a novel hardware approach that adaptively reduces sampling rates based on scene analysis and frame coherence, enhancing energy efficiency without quality loss.

Findings

Achieves 1.68x speedup in rendering performance

Reduces energy consumption by 40% on mobile GPUs

Effectively removes redundancy in fragment shading

Abstract

In real-time rendering, a 3D scene is modelled with meshes of triangles that the GPU projects to the screen. They are discretized by sampling each triangle at regular space intervals to generate fragments which are then added texture and lighting effects by a shader program. Realistic scenes require detailed geometric models, complex shaders, high-resolution displays and high screen refreshing rates, which all come at a great compute time and energy cost. This cost is often dominated by the fragment shader, which runs for each sampled fragment. Conventional GPUs sample the triangles once per pixel, however, there are many screen regions containing low variation that produce identical fragments and could be sampled at lower than pixel-rate with no loss in quality. Additionally, as temporal frame coherence makes consecutive frames very similar, such variations are usually maintained from frame to frame. This work proposes Dynamic Sampling Rate (DSR), a novel hardware mechanism to reduce redundancy and improve the energy efficiency in graphics applications. DSR analyzes the spatial frequencies of the scene once it has been rendered. Then, it leverages the temporal coherence in consecutive frames to decide, for each region of the screen, the lowest sampling rate to employ in the next frame that maintains image quality. We evaluate the performance of a state-of-the-art mobile GPU architecture extended with DSR for a wide variety of applications. Experimental results show that DSR is able to remove most of the redundancy inherent in the color computations at fragment granularity, which brings average speedups of 1.68x and energy savings of 40%.