LiveRender: A Cloud Gaming System Based on Compressed Graphics Streaming

Abstract

In cloud gaming systems, the game program runs at servers in the cloud, while clients access game services by sending input events to the servers and receiving game scenes via video streaming. In this paradigm, servers are responsible for all performance-intensive operations, and thus suffer from poor scalability. An alternative paradigm is called graphics streaming, in which graphics commands and data are offloaded to the clients for local rendering, thereby mitigating the server’s burden and allowing more concurrent game sessions. Unfortunately, this approach is bandwidth-consuming, due to large amounts of graphic commands and geometry data. In this paper, we present LiveRender, an open-source gaming system that remedies the problem by implementing a suite of bandwidth optimization techniques including intraframe compression, interframe compression, and caching, establishing what we call compressed graphics streaming. Experiments results show that the new approach is able to reduce bandwidth consumption by 52%–73% compared to raw graphics streaming, with no perceptible difference in video quality and reduced response delay. Compared to the video streaming approach, LiveRender achieves a traffic reduction of 40%–90% with even improved video quality and substantially smaller response delay, while enabling higher concurrency at the server.