Impact of information buffering on a flexible cloud gaming system

Abstract

Cloud gaming will make high quality gaming more accessible to everyone. It not only relieves users of the constant need to upgrade their hardware, but also makes it possible to enjoy high quality gaming on a variety of devices. Although cloud gaming alleviates some of the hardware constraints associated with end user devices, it does come at a cost - an array of performance issues such as increased bandwidth usage, degradation in visual quality, and higher interactive latency. In previous work, we proposed a flexible cloud gaming system that utilizes different combinations of local and remote resources that trades off different performance requirements. A 3D image warping technique is used to help reduce or even eliminate interactive latency by making use of the most recently received residual frame. However, due to occlusion effect and insufficient sampling, some of the pixels will not get the residual information needed to recover their original values. In this paper, we address this issue by applying 3D image warping to multiple recently received and buffered residual frames. Our experimental results show that the impact on visual quality can be positive or negative depending on factors such as interactive latency and base Level of Detail (LOD) models used on the client side.