The embodiments set forth a technique for targeted scaling of the voltage and/or frequency of hardware components included in a mobile computing device. One embodiment involves independently analyzing the individual frame rates of each animation within a user interface (UI) of a mobile computing device instead of analyzing the frame rate of the UI as a whole. This can involve establishing, for each animation being displayed within the UI, a corresponding performance control pipeline that generates a control signal for scaling a performance mode of the hardware components (e.g., a Central Processing Unit (CPU)) included in the mobile computing device. In this manner, the control signals generated by the performance control pipelines can be aggregated to produce a control signal that causes a power management component to scale the performance mode(s) of the hardware components.