{"ID":6537749,"CreatedAt":"2026-07-14T02:54:43.516908796Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-07-15T03:28:55.185153975Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11231","arxiv_id":"2607.11231","title":"SAIL: Perceptual Quality-Aware Rate Control for Cloud Gaming","abstract":"Cloud gaming streams cloud-rendered frames under strict motion-to-photon latency, yet its at-scale viability is increasingly constrained by bandwidth cost: in our study of the T cloud gaming platform, bandwidth accounts for 30-60% of total operating expense. This high bandwidth consumption stems from a fidelity-first objective of making the stream perceptually indistinguishable from local gameplay. It drives production systems toward best-effort bitrate allocation that pushes the encoder to the highest rate allowed by congestion control. However, the bitrate-perception relationship saturates: beyond a frame-dependent perceptually lossless threshold, additional bits yield negligible perceptual improvement, creating systematic redundant quality that wastes bandwidth. We present SAIL, a production quality-aware rate control system with the goal of achieving perceptually lossless quality while avoiding unnecessary bandwidth waste. SAIL adopts a post-encoding architecture to enable millisecond-scale feedback at near-zero overhead. It comprises three key designs: (i) an encoder-driven quality assessment model that leverages zero-cost encoder outputs for real-time quality estimation; (ii) a hybrid rate control mechanism that balances steady-state adaptation with dynamic spike absorption; and (iii) a network-aware strategy that coordinates with congestion control to prevent capacity underestimation. SAIL has been fully deployed on the T cloud gaming platform and reduces bandwidth consumption by 44.27% and end-to-end latency by 8.37% without degrading perceived quality, serving tens of millions of users and accumulating billions of hours of total gameplay.","short_abstract":"Cloud gaming streams cloud-rendered frames under strict motion-to-photon latency, yet its at-scale viability is increasingly constrained by bandwidth cost: in our study of the T cloud gaming platform, bandwidth accounts for 30-60% of total operating expense. This high bandwidth consumption stems from a fidelity-first o...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11231","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.11231v1","authors":"[\"Houde Qian\",\"Chenglei Wu\",\"Jiaxing Zhang\",\"Rui-Xiao Zhang\",\"Jing Wang\",\"Meijia Song\",\"Sijia Chen\",\"Xiaozhong Xu\",\"Zhi Wang\",\"Lifeng Sun\",\"Honghao Liu\"]","published":"2026-07-13T08:19:31Z","proceeding":"cs.NI","tasks":"[\"cs.NI\",\"cs.MM\",\"eess.IV\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false}