Remote execution for 3D graphics on mobile devices

Mobile devices have limited processing power and wireless networks have limited bandwidth. A modern photorealistic graphics application is resource-hungry, consumes large amounts of CPU cycles, memory and network bandwidth if networked. Moreover running them on mobile devices may also diminish their battery power in the process. The majority of graphics computations are floating point operations, which can run significantly slower on mobile devices that do not have floating point units or 3D graphics accelerators. Proposed solutions such as input mesh simplification are lossy and reduce photorealism. Remote execution, wherein part or entire rendering process is offloaded to a powerful surrogate server, is an attractive solution. We propose pipeline-splitting, a paradigm whereby 15 sub-stages of the graphics pipeline are isolated and instrumented with networking code such that they can run on either a mobile client or a surrogate server. To validate our concepts, we instrument Mesa3D, a popular implementation of the OpenGL graphics to support pipeline-splitting, creating Remote Mesa (RMesa). We explore various mappings of the graphics pipeline to the client and server while monitoring key performance metrics such as total rendering time, power consumption on the client and network usage and establish conditions under which remote execution is an optimal solution. Our results show that even with the incurred roundtrip delay, our remote execution framework can improve rendering performance by up to 10 times when rendering a moderate-sized graphics mesh file.