By Gunnar Berger

My lab in growing at an enormous pace. The culprit of this is my current mission to push the limits on what you can do with a GPU inside of a virtual desktop. One thing I’ve been bullish on is that a virtual desktop done right can give a user experience that is as good as or better than a physical desktop. All the stuff happening in the GPU space really shows what I mean by this. My hope is that these videos wow people when they see what is possible on a virtual desktop. Something else that should be impressive is that you won’t even notice the protocol in these videos, as the protocols do a fantastic job of pushing this high end content.

Without further ado I give you my first series of tests:

Direct X 9 – Pre-Beta from 2012

This first video I share as a point of reference. I started playing with GPUs on VMs well before they were public knowledge, and well before Gartner hired me. This is a video I uploaded about a year ago where I did a DirectX 9 test. The test goes horribly, and the only reason I make it public at this point is because I find it humorous to see how much has changed in a year. (Please only watch 5 seconds of this video, its very boring)

Direct X 9 Test: Experimental (Tech Preview)

As you can see the videos are night and day differences. They also aren’t apples to apples. I was using different GPUs different drivers, VIBS, servers, you name it and most likely it changed from the first test to the second. However, the goal was the same, you have a VM playing a DirectX game. Not bad considering this is less than a year of changes. (Again no need to watch the hole video, just click somewhere in the middle of it.)

Solidworks Test / Starcraft 2 Test:

The test I have been working on this week is running the NVIDIA K2 on VMware View 5.2. I’m doing a vDGA test (or direct passthrough of the GPU to the VM — this is experimental but public). If you are looking for instructions on how to setup this up you can find them here.

In the original Solidworks test I had a few bugs that I ended up fixing in the second Solidworks and Starcraft 2 test. Again its all experimental however, its very interesting to see how GPU has the potential to change the VDI landscape. I’m doing high end stuff here, but I see a potential to just give this to everybody and make the transition from physical desktop to virtual desktops invisible to the users. I plan on doing lots of fun research around this and in future tests you’ll see me testing XenDesktop on top of XenServer (XenServer does not do API intercepts like View and vSphere do so a side by side test should be interesting). I also will move away from the games and continue to push other areas in graphics. I open it up to the community to suggest which tests you’d like to see next.

Test Suggestions:

• More powerful model in Solidworks (like a car! BMW/Audi/Telsa)
• Healthcare 3D imaging (This would be the ultimate test but getting a demo 3D image isn’t easy)
• I’ll add more suggests as they come in

Via: Gunnar