Tech Tip #64: Stop rendering what nobody can see

Halo Infinite rendered 4K behind its pause menu. Fixing it saved 15%.

Video created by explainapaper.com

The problem

Games keep rendering full scenes behind menus, pause screens and lobbies where the player cannot see them. The GPU works flat out on invisible frames.

The fix you can use today

  • Drop resolution or frame rate behind pause menus and blurred overlays.
  • Cap frame rates in menus and lobbies.
  • Measure power in each game state, not only in gameplay.

Microsoft found that fixing the pause menu in Halo Infinite cut its power use by 15%. GreenCode's research review draws on this work.

Tools that help

  • Xbox Sustainability Toolkit (Microsoft): power monitoring for games in PIX, plus published case studies of energy-saving changes
  • PowerJoular: monitors the power of a machine and of individual processes on PCs, servers and single-board computers

How GreenCode helps

GreenCode helps tackle this by treating hardware demand as a measure of software quality: it finds the code driving processor, memory and network demand and rewrites it, so the same features run on the hardware already installed. More on this.

Tags

#games#gpu#devices

Sources

Transcript

Halo Infinite drew its full game behind the pause menu. Fixing that saved fifteen percent. Many games keep drawing the whole world behind menus. Behind pause screens and lobbies too. The player cannot see any of it. But the graphics chip works flat out on those hidden frames. Microsoft fixed that pause menu, and its power use fell by fifteen percent. Players did not notice any difference. GreenCode's research review draws on this work. Here is the fix you can use today. Behind a pause menu or a blurred overlay, drop the resolution or frame rate. Cap the frame rate in menus and lobbies. Then measure power in every game state, not only during play. Tools like the Xbox Sustainability Toolkit and PowerJoular show the power draw. Across millions of players, small savings add up. GreenCode helps tackle this by finding the code driving processor, memory and network demand. Then it rewrites it, so the same features run on the hardware already installed. That was GreenCode Tech Tip number sixty-four. Follow for the next tip, and find more on greencode.ai/tech-tips.

All GreenCode Tech Tips · All GreenCode videos

  • Tip #64
  • For Developers
  • Length 1:10
  • Category HPC, embedded, mobile and games
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