SAIL: Perceptual Quality-Aware Rate Control for Cloud Gaming

Houde Qian; Chenglei Wu; Jiaxing Zhang; Rui-Xiao Zhang; Jing Wang; Meijia Song; Sijia Chen; Xiaozhong Xu; Zhi Wang; Lifeng Sun; Honghao Liu

arXiv · 2607.11231

SAIL: Perceptual Quality-Aware Rate Control for Cloud Gaming

Houde Qian·Chenglei Wu·Jiaxing Zhang·Rui-Xiao Zhang·Jing Wang·Meijia Song·Sijia Chen·Xiaozhong Xu·Zhi Wang·Lifeng Sun·Honghao Liu

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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.

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BibTeX RIS

Houde Qian, Chenglei Wu, Jiaxing Zhang, Rui-Xiao Zhang, Jing Wang, Meijia Song, Sijia Chen, Xiaozhong Xu, Zhi Wang, Lifeng Sun, Honghao Liu. 2026-07-13. SAIL: Perceptual Quality-Aware Rate Control for Cloud Gaming. https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11231

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