Abstract
One of the major sources of power drain in smartphones is a frame rendering and display process called graphics pipeline, in which power consumption depends largely on frame rendering operations per second (fps), known as the frame rate, and the quantity of UI content to be rendered. We discovered a major problem causing power consumption upon a scrolling operation: The Android graphics pipeline renders all or a large portion of the content displayed most recently at a frame rate of nearly 60 fps. This paper proposes a scrolling-aware rendering (SCAR) scheme to reduce the frame rate caused by a scrolling. When rendering a frame for UI content to be displayed, SCAR pre-renders UI content that is likely to be displayed soon in any subsequent scrolling operation. This frame is extended to place the pre-rendered UI content contiguously with the UI content to be displayed. Upon a subsequent scrolling, SCAR repositions the extended frame on screen by a scrolling distance instead of rendering a new frame. Our experiments on a smartphone show that SCAR reduced frame rates to below one fps in scrolling, thus saving power by up to 30%.
Highlights
Smartphones have become equipped with high-performance CPUs, GPUs, and display panels, but battery capacity has not yet met the increasing power demands of the components
This paper proposes a scrolling-aware rendering (SCAR) scheme to reduce frame rates caused by scrolling without compromising the user experience
We propose the SCAR scheme to reduce the frame rate caused by scrolling on a scrollable window including a scrollable view such as the RecyclerView and ListView
Summary
Smartphones have become equipped with high-performance CPUs, GPUs, and display panels, but battery capacity has not yet met the increasing power demands of the components. This paper proposes a scrolling-aware rendering (SCAR) scheme to reduce frame rates caused by scrolling without compromising the user experience. Our scheme has an important feature to be applicable to various display panels regardless of the type of display technology because it attempts to lessen frame rates to reduce CPU and GPU overheads caused by frame rendering operations. An evaluation on a Google Pixel 3XL smartphone shows that SCAR reduced the average frame rate to below one fps by reusing frames in scrolling This reduction lessens CPU and GPU overheads by up to about 65% and 100%, respectively, compared to the Android graphics pipeline, reducing power by up to 30%. Our study is the first attempt to pre-render content in the Android graphics pipeline to improve power consumption during scrolling.
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