Distributed rendering: Interaction delay reduction in remote rendering with client-end GPU-accelerated scene warping technique

PubDate: September 2017

Teams: National Taiwan University

Writers: Yu-Jung Chen ; Chung-Yao Hung ; Shao-Yi Chien

PDF: Distributed rendering: Interaction delay reduction in remote rendering with client-end GPU-accelerated scene warping technique

Abstract

In a remote rendering system, the display device and the main graphics processing unit (GPU) are located in different places, which is a kind of client-server architecture and is widely used in cloud gaming and virtual reality (VR). To reduce the interaction delay and improve the user experience especially when the link between the server and client becomes wireless, we propose a client-end GPU-accelerated scene warping technique to approximate the rendered frames between key frames, meanwhile hiding the interaction delay. The distributed rendering technique can warp and interpolate images on the client end with the server-rendered reference background images and the corresponding depth maps. A mobile GPU is also employed to accelerate the image warping operation. In addition, the foreground layer is rendered with GPU and then blended with the approximated background layer generated from background warping. A prototype of the proposed system is implemented with a commercialized smart phone. Compared with the video streaming-based cloud gaming system, the evaluation results show that the Game Mean Opinion Score (GMOS) increases from 1 to 4.1 for the interactive games even in a high network delay condition.