Remoting Graphics and GPU’s in End User Computing

Remoting Graphics and GPU’s in End User computing are becoming commodity. The days where GPU was beneficial to only very specific applications like AutoDesk, AutoCad, Solidworks et cetera are definitely over. Today, almost every Remoting Windows environment can benefit from Remoting Graphics. Even applications like Office and also browsers can leverage a GPU in a Remote Windows environment. With the N-series on Azure being available for some time now, Remote Desktop Services or Virtual Desktop Infrastructure hosted on Azure IaaS is also able to use GPU. Companies like Frame offer options to leverage that same GPU in their solutions, even with a fully web based client. I recently attended a webinar where they showed this in an impressive demo.

 

With GPU being commodity and several remoting protocols being available that can offer it, the question arises which one to use. As always, it can be answered by the usual IT answer; “it depends!”. Comparisons are interesting to match use cases to remoting protocols. This is exactly what Benny Tritsch and Kristin Griffin recently did in a test where they compared the user experience of RDP vs PCoIP.

 

The primary focus of the test was on benchmarking the performance of graphics workloads in Hyper-V virtual machines accelerated by NVIDIA M60 GPUs attached through Discrete Device Assignment (DDA).

 

“In our test environment, we used the REX Analytics framework to benchmark remote end-user experience (REX) by simulating a range of user interaction workloads. The REX Analytics framework includes fully automated (synthetic) test sequences, control services, management consoles, agents, screen and telemetry data recorders, analysis tools and a unique visualization component. The framework works on-premises and in cloud environments.”

 

The results of these test show contain some interesting comparison videos. Read the full article, including links to various video’s here: http://www.rdsgurus.com/rdp10-versus-pcoip-on-hyper-v-with-dda/