Power management using game state detection on android smartphones

Compute intensive games currently represent the class of most popular and at the same time most power consuming applications on mobile phones. To reduce the power consumption of games we have developed a game state specific power management technique. Games typically consist of several states such as the game loading, main menu, in-game menu and gaming state. Each of these states has its specific processing requirements, e.g., the game loading state is likely to be memory bound and menu scenes are less interactive than gaming states and hence do not require high frame rates to satisfy the user's perception. Our game state specific governor (i) recognizes these game states by intercepting and analyzing calls made by the game application to the graphics library, and (ii) exploits these state-specific characteristics to enable power management strategies targeted to these individual states at runtime. Thereby, we achieve significant power savings of up to 50.8% compared to Android's default interactive governor.