Power consumption in remote gaming: An empirical evaluation

The thin-client approach for gaming is becoming more popular. For instance, Nvidia Shield, Valve Steam and Shinra technologies have offerings based on the concept. In remote cloud gaming, the game is being executed and processed in the cloud while the user receives a video and audio stream of the game, in a very similar way as with remote desktop clients. At the same time, clouds are moving towards the end-users as “edge clouds” with different standardization bodies, such Open Mobile Edge Cloud and Open Fog Consortium, giving momentum for the efforts. Were remote gaming approaches to utilize edge clouds, the games could be played without installing any infrastructure at the homes of end-users while keeping network delays to the latency-sensitive games low. While waiting for such edge-cloud deployments to substantiate, even regional clouds could be utilized for the purpose. In such environments, remote cloud gaming can already now be utilized by game companies as an alternative to traditional download-and-install games in order to support, e.g., anti-piracy protection. While the incentives for the game companies are relatively clear, the end-user experience has been investigated mainly from the viewpoint of latency. In this paper, we fill a research gap related to energy efficiency by showing that mobile phone users can save between 12 and 32 % power by utilizing remote gaming instead of playing with a native app. Our prototype is based on GamingAnywhere open-source software for which we have also integrated a gamepad for easier controls. We show power measurements both with a 2D and 3D games, and also additional measurements with a smart TV-stick.