Exploring Real Time Multimedia Content Creation in Video Games

Video games represent a class of media applications for which creating video content is as important as displaying it. In this paper, we compare video games running on an Apple Macintosh G5 to DVD playback and the QuickTime media player. We use performance monitor counters to find the IPC, the L1 data cache miss rate and the AGP and processor memory bandwidth. We find the frame-oriented nature of all of these applications reflected in many of the metrics used in this study. Video game applications exhibit significantly less idle time between updates to the screen than DVD playback and QuickTime. The results also show that adding computer controlled characters to a video game further reduces the idle time, and causes a decrease in the L2 cache pressure, spreading the access misses over a longer time period.