Decoupling Video Upscaling from Rendering for Cloud Gaming
Deniz Ugur, Ihab Amer, Mohamed M. Hefeeda · 2025
Many recent video games require powerful hardware to render them. To reduce such high hardware requirements, upscalers have been proposed in the literature and industry. Upscalers save computing resources by first rendering games at lower resolutions and frame rates and then upscaling them to improve players' quality of experience. Current upscalers, however, are tightly coupled with the rendering logic of video games, which requires updating the source code of each game for every upscaler. This increases the development cost and limits the use of upscalers. The tight coupling also stifles the deployment of upscalers in cloud gaming platforms to reduce the required computing resources. We propose decoupling upscalers from game renderers, which allows utilizing various upscalers with games without changing their source code. It also accelerates deploying upscalers in cloud gaming. Decoupling upscalers from renderers is, however, challenging because of the diversity of upscalers, their dependency on information at different rendering stages, and the strict timing requirements of video games. We present an efficient solution that addresses these challenges. We implement the proposed solution and demonstrate its effectiveness with two popular upscalers. We also develop a cloud gaming system in the emerging Media-over-QUIC (MoQ) protocol and implement the proposed approach with it. Our experiments show the potential savings in computing resources while meeting the strict timing constraints of video games.