Surface Compression Using Dynamic Color Palettes Ayub A. Gubran Felix Huang Tor M. Aamodt University of British Columbia Carnegie Mellon University University of British Columbia Vancouver, BC, Canada Pittsburgh, PA, United States Vancouver, BC, Canada
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT framebuffer surfaces, which are composited to a single Off-chip memory traffic is a major source of power and surface for screen display. Also GPUs can use frame- energy consumption on mobile platforms. A large amount buffer surfaces as inputs to additional rendering stages, of this off-chip traffic is used to manipulate graphics e.g., render to texture and deferred shading; as a result, framebuffer surfaces. To cut down the cost of accessing any given application may utilize one or more frame- off-chip memory, framebuffer surfaces are compressed buffer surfaces. to reduce the bandwidth consumed on surface manipu- This work studies a large set of Android workloads to lation when rendering or displaying. infer the compression properties of framebuffer surfaces In this work, we study the compression properties generated by mobile UI, 2D and 3D applications. Our of framebuffer surfaces and highlight the fact that sur- study found that framebuffers from different classes of faces from different applications have different compres- workloads have different compression properties. We sion characteristics. We use the results of our analysis exploit these properties to propose an effective palette- to propose a scheme, Dynamic Color Palettes (DCP), based framebuffer compression scheme that focuses on which achieves higher compression rates with UI and common UI and 2D applications.