Paper accepted @ ACM Multimedia 2026

Title: EnerGP: Energy Evaluation in Video Game Style Post-Processing

Authors: Milad Ghanbari, Hadi Amirpour, Christian Timmere

Abstract

We present EnerGP, an interactive demo running on the Meta Quest 3 standalone eXtended Reality (XR) headset that enables real-time control over various video game-style post-processing effects in a Virtual Reality (VR) environment. The demo lets users observe the asymmetric relationship between post-processing effects and power consumption. While real-time rendering creates additional GPU overhead for each active post-processing pass, pre-rendered video or streamed video with the same effects baked in, results in measurably lower visual complexity, and thus a reduced hardware-accelerated decoding burden. We validate this finding through a pilot study that used the Enhanced Video Complexity Analyzer (EVCA) by comparing a pre-rendered 3D scene exported with and without seven post-processing effects: (1) Bloom, (2) Depth of Field, (3) Motion Blur, (4) Fog Volume, (5) Color Grading, (6) Screen-Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO), (7) Temporal Anti-Aliasing (TAA). Results show that post-processing reduces spatial complexity by 17.1% and temporal complexity by 37.1% in the video condition. The demo, deployed on Meta Quest 3, allows users to toggle effects in real time and observe live power and performance metrics via the OVR Metrics Tool.