Display power reduction for mobile closed-source games

With the rapid development of mobile games, power consumption and battery life of mobile platforms become a crucial problem, therefore, saving power for display which consumes a lot of power without decreasing the user experience becomes necessary. Content-centric techniques are most commonly used to save display power. However, they cannot be applied to closed-source games as they need to modify the game images. In this paper, we explore a backlight power model and propose a novel method to make a trade-off between the game image quality and display power. Different from content-centric methods, based on the proposed trade-off model, we propose a backlight dimming algorithm which maintains the user game experience using game-state information and saves display power for mobile games without modifying any game image. We implement the proposed trade-off model and backlight dimming policy in a contemporary mobile platform where the evaluation results show that, maintaining a specific game image quality level, our policy can save system power up to 10.43% compared with the static policy without decreasing games' performances.