Accelerating a Classic 3D Video Game on Heterogeneous Reconfigurable MPSoCs

Heterogeneous Reconfigurable MPSoCs, coupling microprocessors with Programmable Logic, are becoming extremely important in High-Performance Embedded Computing domain where energy consumption is a key factor to be considered by every designer. However, efficient hardware/software co-design still requires experience and a big effort: finding an optimal solution and an acceptable trade-off between performance and energy may require several tests and it is strongly platform-dependent. To this respect, a Dataflow-based method is used in this work for exploring different hardware/software configurations (number of hardware accelerators and FPGA frequency). As a use case, the acceleration of a well-known 3D video game (DOOM) is presented. The method offers rapid trade-off analysis in terms of non-functional parameters such as computing performance or power/energy measurements.