3D Graphics Benchmarks for Low-Power Architectures

Currently, there is much interest in wireless 3D graphics applications, in particular games. Since current 3D graphics accelerators consume too much power to be employed in mobile computing devices, several companies and universities have started to develop low-power 3D graphics accelerators. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is no publicly available benchmark suite appropriate for evaluating such devices. In this paper we present a set of 3D graphics benchmarks which can be considered typical 3D workloads of contemporary and emerging mobile devices. First, reasons why most 3D benchmarks employed for desktop computers are not suitable for mobile environments are given. After that, simulation results such as the number of triangles or fragments processed by a typical rasterization pipeline are presented. Finally, we discuss some architectural implications of the obtained results for low-power implementations.