Kahawai

This paper presents Kahawai1, a system that provides high-quality gaming on mobile devices, such as tablets and smartphones, by offloading a portion of the GPU computation to server-side infrastructure. In contrast with previous thin-client approaches that require a server-side GPU to render the entire content, Kahawai uses collaborative rendering to combine the output of a mobile GPU and a server-side GPU into the displayed output. Compared to a thin client, collaborative rendering requires significantly less network bandwidth between the mobile device and the server to achieve the same visual quality and, unlike a thin client, collaborative rendering supports disconnected operation, allowing a user to play offline - albeit with reduced visual quality.