Concurrents published in IEEE Computer cover feature, May 2022

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.