Application of deep learning upscaling technologies in cloud gaming solutions

Durant tota la seva història, la indústria dels videojocs ha vist com any rere any els requeriments hardware de les entregues més populars del mercat augmentaven amb cada nova sortida. Això, juntament amb l'encariment dels components hardware necessaris per poder executar aquests videojocs causat per la pandèmia i per l'auge del mercat de les criptomonedes ha condicionat al sorgiment d'un nou tipus de servei: el cloud gaming. Utilitzant tecnología de streaming de video, el cloud gaming és capaç d'oferir als seus usuaris la capacitat de poder jugar a qualsevol de les últimes entregues del mercat des de qualsevol peça de hardware. Aquesta nova aparició, però, no ha ocorregut sense dificultats, dons els alts requeriments pel que fa a latència i ample de banda dificulten a l'usuari a l'hora de tenir una bona experiència amb el servei. Per tal d'intentar millorar aquesta experiència, en aquest treball s'exploraran les possibles millores que podria aportar l'ús de tècniques de machine learning a l'hora de realitzar un reescalat del tràfic de video per tal d'aconseguir una major resolució final a partir d'una resolució menor de transmissió, reduint l'ample de banda necessari i subseqüentment la latencia del servei.Throughout its history, the video game industry has seen the hardware requirements of the most popular titles on the market increase year after year with each new release. This, in conjunction with the rise in the cost of the hardware components needed to run these video games caused by the pandemic and the rise of the cryptocurrency market, has led to the creation of a new type of services: cloud gaming. Using video streaming technology, cloud gaming is able to offer its users the ability to play any of the latest releases on the market from any piece of hardware. This new appearance, however, has not happened without difficulties, because the high requirements in terms of latency and bandwidth make it difficult for the user to have a good experience with the service. In order to try to improve this experience, this work will explore the possible improvements that could be made by the use of machine learning techniques when re-scaling video traffic to achieve a higher final resolution from a lower transmission resolution, reducing the required bandwidth and subsequently the latency of the service

A Survey of the Ability of the Linux Operating System to Support Online Game Execution

Linux has suffered sluggish home user uptake due mainly to the dominance of rivals, and has seen numerous incarnations as a gaming platform fall flat. Gaming is a particularly sensitive application given its intensive bandwidth and system response requirements; these applications therefore place specific demands on the Operating System platform on which game play is supported. In this work, the ability of the Linux operating system to support execution of online games is explored through a survey of the state-of-the-art in this area. Given the recent increase in cloud-based online gaming, it can be concluded that the time is ripe for more widespread Linux uptake, especially in the gaming domain. This is particularly true today given the amount of exposure to Information Technology across society in general, and ongoing deployment of Internet of Things environments: Linux's open source, modular and freely customisable design may therefore not be as daunting as before, and the unique benefits of this platform may be exploited for the experiences it can bring to applications in general and, specific to the context of this work, players in their game play. This paper makes a unique contribution to the field: Although a number of articles are available within the general area of Linux and gameplay, a thorough survey on this issue has not been seen so far. This is therefore the gap to which this paper contributes

A Performance Comparison of VMware GPU Virtualization Techniques in Cloud Gaming

Cloud gaming is an application deployment scenario which runs an interactive gaming application remotely in a cloud according to the commands received from a thin client and streams the scenes as a video sequence back to the client over the Internet, and it is of interest to both research community and industry. The academic community has developed some open-source cloud gaming systems such as GamingAnywhere for research study, while some industrial pioneers such as Onlive and Gaikai have succeeded in gaining a large user base in the cloud gaming market. Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) virtualization plays an important role in such an environment as it is a critical component that allows virtual machines to run 3D applications with performance guarantees. Currently, GPU pass-through and GPU sharing are the two main techniques of GPU virtualization. The former enables a single virtual machine to access a physical GPU directly and exclusively, while the latter makes a physical GPU shareable by multiple virtual machines. VMware Inc., one of the most popular virtualization solution vendors, has provided concrete implementations of GPU pass-through and GPU sharing. In particular, it provides a GPU pass-through solution called Virtual Dedicated Graphics Acceleration (vDGA) and a GPU-sharing solution called Virtual Shared Graphics Acceleration (vSGA). Moreover, VMware Inc. recently claimed it realized another GPU sharing solution called vGPU. Nevertheless, the feasibility and performance of these solutions in cloud gaming has not been studied yet. In this work, an experimental study is conducted to evaluate the feasibility and performance of GPU pass-through and GPU sharing solutions offered by VMware in cloud gaming scenarios. The primary results confirm that vDGA and vGPU techniques can fit the demands of cloud gaming. In particular, these two solutions achieved good performance in the tested graphics card benchmarks, and gained acceptable image quality and response delay for the tested games

Game design and development

The project focuses on computer tools suitable for particular game genres and how they are used to develop 3D computer games. As part of learning about the tools, the author developed a 3D computer adventure game called Adventures of Smiley using Macromedia Director MX and 3D Studio Max. The game\u27s purpose is to engage children using a friendly interface while they learn about different topics in various subject areas through lessons and puzzles. The research gathered information about the current game industry, technologies and game genres, which can be used as a reference for the beginning level game programmer. The project documentation and the game are also published on the Internet and can be freely accessed online

Parallel game programming

On this TFG I wanted to find out if parallel programing is and will be used to develop and optimize games. We have this impression because of the fact that nowadays processors improve its power not raising the processing speed but raising the processing units. At the end of the TFG through the development of a windows platform layer we found out that modern low-level APIs give a lot of options to use parallel programming in the form of multithreading of rendering tasks, using SIMD instructions and having the compute pipeline to perform GPUGP tasks. We also found out why the GPU outperforms the CPU at parallel algorithm processing and how we can optimize GPU work focusing mainly on coalesced memory access and memory throughput but also measuring the occupancy and concurrency

VIDEO GAME TEXTS: A BRIEF ANALYSIS OF THE APPRAISAL CHOICES PRESENT IN GAMING NEWS AND REVIEWS

This final paper is a result of the undergraduate program of the Licenciatura em Letras Língua Inglesa at Universidade Federal da Paraíba. As part of today’s modern culture, video games have been gaining space in people’s lives and in the media. In this context, the main purpose of this work is to investigate the use of Attitude, a sub-category of the Appraisal system (MARTIN; WHITE, 2005), in 4 texts related to the gaming community, that is, 2 news report and 2 reviews, so as to unpack the meanings construed for the different communicative reasons of the texts types. This work will focus on investigating how attitudinal items affects both texts types by carrying out a quantitative analysis and contrasting with semantic and lexico-grammatical attributes of both texts types. Results suggests that gaming media acts in benefiting one specific gaming company in contrast to the other.Esta monografia é resultado do programa de graduação em Licenciatura em Letras Língua Inglesa pela Universidade Federal da Paraíba. Como parte da cultura moderna de hoje, o vídeo game tem ganho espaço na vida das pessoas e na mídia. O propósito deste trabalho visa investigar o uso do sistema de Atitude – uma subcategoria do sistema de Avaliatividade (MARTIN; WHITE, 2005) –, em quatro textos relacionados à comunidade de jogadores, isto é, duas notícias e duas resenhas, assim como descompactar a interpretação de significado pelas diferentes razões de comunicação nos tipos de texto. Este trabalho se encarregará de investigar como itens de Atitude afetam ambos tipos textuais através de uma análise quantitativa em contraste com atributos léxico-gramaticais dos ambos tipos textuais. Os resultados sugerem que a mídia de games atua em benefício de uma específica empresa de jogos em contraste com outra

A cloud gaming framework for dynamic graphical rendering towards achieving distributed game engines

Cloud gaming in recent years has gained growing success in delivering games-as-a-service by leveraging cloud resources. Existing cloud gaming frameworks deploy the entire game engine within Virtual Machines (VMs) due to the tight-coupling of game engine subsystems (graphics, physics, AI). The effectiveness of such an approach is heavily dependant on the cloud VM providing consistently high levels of performance, availability, and reliability. However this assumption is difficult to guarantee due to QoS degradation within, and outside of, the cloud - from system failure, network connectivity, to consumer datacaps - all of which may result in game service outage. We present a cloud gaming framework that creates a distributed game engine via loose-coupling the graphical renderer from the game engine, allowing for its execution across cloud VMs and client devices dynamically. Our framework allows games to operate during performance degradation and cloud service failure, enabling game developers to exploit heterogeneous graphical APIs unrestricted from Operating System and hardware constraints. Our initial experiments show that our framework improves game frame rates by up to 33% via frame interlacing between cloud and client systems

MMX-Accelerated Real-Time Hand Tracking System

We describe a system for tracking real-time hand gestures captured by a cheap web camera and a standard Intel Pentium based personal computer with no specialized image processing hardware. To attain the necessary processing speed, the system exploits the Multi-Media Instruction set(MMX) extensions of the Intel Pentium chip family through software including. the Microsoft DirectX SDK and the Intel Image Processing and Open Source Computer Vision (OpenCV) libraries. The system is based on the Camshift algorithm (from OpenCV) and the compound constant acceleration Kalman filter algorithms. Tracking is robust and efficient and can track hand motion at 30 fps

Silverlight Game Engine

Bakalářská práce popisuje tvorbu 2.5D herního enginu určeného pro platformu Microsoft Silverlight 3.0 s využitím programovacího jazyka C# pro kód jadra samotního engineu a jazyka XAML pro tvorbu uživatelského rozhraní. V první kapitole je úvod do světa herních enginu, dále jsou vzpomenuty cíle této práce a motivace. V druhé kapitole následuje představení jednotlivých využitých nástrojů a technologií včetně porovnání platformy Microsoft Silverlight s platformou Adobe Flash. Třetí kapitola popisuje řešení které existovaly v čase psaní této práce. Čtvrtá kapitola popisuje popis herního enginu a návrh jednotlivých částí enginu. Samotný postup tvorby enginu je popsán v páte kapitole. Jednotlivé části zahrnují popis herní smyčky a více možností jak ji realizovat, vykreslování mapy, herní objekty, jejich hierarchie a jejich využití, spracovaní uživatelských vstupů z klávesnice a myši, systém řídící pohyb objektů po mapě, jejich animaci, systém událostí, efekty počasí a pixel shader efekty, zvukový systém a nakonec editor map. Šestá kapitola obsahuje výsledky testů a jejich vyhodnocení. V závěru práce jsou zhodnoceny výsledky práce a jsou představeny návrhy pro další rozšiření. Pŕílohy obsahují detailní popis formátu, v kterém se ukládají mapy, obsah přiloženého CD, ukázkový kód v jazyce XAML a v jazyce HLSL.This bachelor's thesis describes the creation of a 2.5D game engine for Microsoft Silverlight 3.0 platform using C# programming language and XAML language to create user interface. Used tools and existing solutions are introduced in the introductory chapters. In following chapters the design and the process of creating the game engine itself is described. In this section multiple design choices for parts of game engine are presented, and the chosen ones are described in more detail together with justification of these choices. In the last part the outcome of the project is evaluated and ideas for further development are presented.