Hi WP,
Thanks for all your replies on this post, it's good to have some clarity. You mentioned that "Today video is not accelerated by the GPU." ...is this something that is on the roadmap for the vSGA driver?
I ask because NVIDIA's marketing material for the Grid K1 and K2 boards makes this claim:
The Kepler GPU includes a high-performance H.264 encoding engine capable of encoding simultaneous streams with superior quality.
I'll assume that engine can decode as well, so that would suggest Kepler is atleast capable of assisting with video renders. Is this a driver limitation for VMware at the moment?
I always take marketing material with doses of salt... the same sheet says:
Low-Latency Remote Display
NVIDIA’s patented low-latency remote display technology greatly improves the user experience by reducing the lag that users feel when interacting with their virtual machine. With this technology, the virtual desktop screen is pushed directly to the remoting protocol.
I've been testing a K2 for a few weeks now and can't say I've been able to reduce lag when compared to a non-Kepler machine, despite many optimization tweaks. What I've read in this thread tells me we may have it as good as things are today, is that right? Is there something specifically built into Kepler which may provide lower latency in the future but is not yet fully utilized in vSGA?
You also mentioned: Adding GPU acceleration is not about getting a higher consolidation ratio. I agree with that; my goal is to find out how many desktops running a specific 3D load can be realistically supported on our hardware... but we can hardly fault anyone for thinking otherwise when NVIDIA says:
Maximum User Density
VGX boards have an optimized multi-GPU design that helps to maximize user density. The VGX K1 board features 4 GPUs and 16 GB of graphics memory, allowing it to support up to 100 users on a single board.
Are any of you actually getting 100 active 3D clients on a host?