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· Joe Hix
Concurrents published in IEEE Computer cover feature, May 2022
Subasset streaming — a novel approach that overcomes the cost, latency, and quality limits of cloud-rendered game streaming.
Our research is the cover feature of IEEE Computer's May 2022 issue. The article introduces subasset streaming, a new approach to game streaming co-authored by Barry L. Jenkins, John Scott, Francois Malassenet, and Kshitij Patil.
The problem with how cloud gaming streams today
Two approaches have dominated:
- Video-based cloud gaming — render the game in a remote GPU, send compressed video back to the player. Costly per user, latency-bound, vulnerable to compression artifacts, and sensitive to jitter and packet loss at 90–144 fps. Quality of experience consistently falls below native gaming hardware.
- Command streaming — designed to reduce costs and improve scalability, but with its own quality and integration tradeoffs.
Subasset streaming
Our contribution is threefold:
- Conservative visibility precomputation — predict the set of assets the player can see, conservatively but tightly.
- Submesh clustering and texture tiling — break assets into fine-grained units so prefetch can be granular.
- A navigation-driven API — let the engine request just the subassets it needs next, in visibility order.
The full IEEE Computer article is available on the IEEE site.