PROJECT TITLE :

Low-Decoding-Latency Buffer Compression for Graphics Processing Units

ABSTRACT:

Power consumption is the key design factor for graphics processing units (GPUs), especially for mobile applications. The increasing bandwidth required to produce more realistic graphics is a major power draw. To address this factor, in this paper, we present a new universal buffer compression method that can handle both color and depth data with the same hardware unit. In contrast to the current state-of-art technologies, which mainly focus on achieving higher and higher compression ratios but discarded the decompression latency, our method reaches a good compromise between the two, which are factors critical to system performance. With spatial prediction and bitstream rearrangement, the data dependencies between different samples are reduced, which enables a parallel decoding process and makes the proposed system have 6.78 times lower decoding latency. Moreover, by adopting a similar concept for the color/depth compression in the DXT5 texture compression method, better quality in terms of PSNR can be achieved without introducing any decoding latency when retrieving a texel.