Abstract
Game engines are at the heart of the design of modern video games. One of their functions is to keep a high frame rate by scheduling the tasks required to generate each frame (image). These tasks are organized in a soft real-time, parallel task graph, which is a scenario very few works have focused on, or adapted scheduling algorithms to. In this paper, we study the scheduling problem of game engines. We model the tasks and the scheduling problem by profiling a commercial game engine, adapt and compare different scheduling algorithms, and propose two additional optimizations regarding the micro-scheduler and the parallelization of targeted tasks.
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Notes
- 1.
Some frame duration changes fall outside the illustrated range.
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Regragui, M., Coye, B., Pilla, L.L., Namyst, R., Barthou, D. (2022). Exploring Scheduling Algorithms for Parallel Task Graphs: A Modern Game Engine Case Study. In: Cano, J., Trinder, P. (eds) Euro-Par 2022: Parallel Processing. Euro-Par 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13440. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12597-3_7
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