3D graphics rendering time modeling and control for mobile terminals

Abstract

3D graphics has found its way to mobile devices such as Personal Digital Assistants (PDA) and cellular phones. Given their limited battery capabilities, these devices typically have less computational resources available than their counterparts connected to a power supply. Additionally, the workload of 3D graphics applications changes very drastically over time. These different and changing conditions make the creation of 3D content a real challenge for the content creators.To allow the rendering of arbitrary content on a mobile device without the need of ad-hoc content creation. We present a framework to adapt the resolution of 3D objects to the available processing resources. An MPEG-4 scalable geometry decoder is used to change the resolution and an analytical model of the workload of a mobile renderer is presented for controlling the scalable decoder. Because of the scarce computational resources, a good balance between accuracy and complexity is needed. The presented approach has an error and a complexity overhead of less than 10% for most practical cases.