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Virtualized GPUs Power Modern VDI User Experiences White Paper Sponsored by NVIDIA January 2017

This white paper will demonstrate why virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) deployments of Microsoft should consider using a virtualized GPU solution, like NVIDIA GRID™, for a smooth, high-quality user experience. It also reports the subjective evaluation of NVIDIA’s GRID VDI running on multiple client platforms.

Introduction

The business case for implementing desktop systems using a VDI are solid, revolving around security, total cost of ownership, maintainability, quick upgrades, simplified application and O/S imaging, and desktop portability. The purpose of this paper is not to rehash these business and IT rationales, but rather to make the case that a proper VDI implementation with today's modern operating systems such as Windows 7, Windows 8, and especially Windows 10, it is imperative that the desktop display be rendered by a virtual graphics processing unit (GPU). To implement VDI using only CPU generated graphics, leaves the solution susceptible to slow, stutter-prone, and generally laggy user responsiveness, resulting in a bad user experience and lost productivity.

Figure 1: Windows VDI displayed on a MacBook

By using a virtual GPU solution, such as NVIDIA GRID, an immersive, high-quality user experience is possible for everyone, from designers to mobile professionals to office workers. This is especially important for enterprises looking to future-proof their VDI implementations so they can meet the emerging needs of the digital workplace and its visual, media-oriented

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workforce. Today’s popular productivity and collaboration applications such as Skype, YouTube, and even PowerPoint require accelerated graphics for optimum performance.

The specific implementation of GPU-accelerated VDI discussed in this paper is that of the NVIDIA GRID Virtual PC edition. As graphics requirements of modern applications and operating systems in the digital workplace continue to increase, NVIDIA GRID can now be leveraged to deliver a great user experience for all client use cases, not just professional graphics applications.

The Operating Systems and Applications of Today’s Digital Workplace Push Graphics and Video

Many VDI implementations do not utilize graphics processors in the mistaken belief that this will save money and reduce system complexity, but ignoring graphics is ignoring the key part of any modern ’s user experience (UX) – the graphical (GUI). Delivering a smooth GUI on modern operating systems like Windows 10 cannot be easily replicated using a server-based CPU such as Intel’s Xeon server processor family, which lack a graphics processing unit. In fact, if you look at laptop and desktop PC processors, each new Intel Core processor is devoting more of the chip area to graphics rendering versus the compute side of the processor; this in order to support a smoother, better UX. This should also hold true of a GUI running within a virtual desktop hosted in a data center or cloud.

Figure 2: Benchmarks showing GRID vs. CPU-only performance

Source: NVIDIA

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NVIDIA has done some comparative subjective testing, shown in Figure 2, which demonstrates the improved user experience when using VDI with GPU acceleration. The company used the widely adopted Login VSI software tool to test and measure VDI performance. Specifically, NVIDIA ran the Knowledge Worker scenario with a test group. The group reported its experiences using both a VDI unit with and without GPU acceleration. The testers performed tasks typical of the digital workplace, including web browsing, watching YouTube videos, creating a simple PowerPoint presentation, using Google Maps, and running a WebGL application. The testers then rated the experience from 1 to 5 (with 5=Outstanding and 1=Unacceptable), with each task compared with performing the task on a dedicated PC.

In most cases, the GPU accelerated task was rated with high 4’s to 5’s showing an outstanding user experience, while some non-GPU scenarios were rated as tolerable to barely usable. The results were particularly dramatic in more visual, multi-media scenarios, typical of the modern digital workplace, such as video playback, launching PowerPoint, Google Maps, and running WebGL. Not surprisingly, traditional, text-based activities, such as an email search, showed very little difference in performance. Overall, there was an average of 34% better user experience scores using GPU acceleration. However, for those tasks more typical of the modern digital workplace, the improvement in the user experience was as high as 133% in the case of running WebGL. This translates into a more engaging and productive user experience.

How People Work Requires a GPU

Higher resolution displays increase productivity as more information can be displayed and it improves the ability to multitask. Multitasking is a fundamental UX attribute that has driven increasing display resolution over the last few years from XGA (1024x768 pixels) to full HD displays (1920x1080 pixels) and beyond – Microsoft’s two-year-old Surface Pro 3 PC tablets are well above full HD at 2160x1440 pixel resolution. XGA to full HD alone is a nominal increase of over 2.5 times as many pixels to render. And display resolution will continue to grow as WQHD and 4K displays come down in price. Only a GPU can keep pace with these increased screen resolutions and the demands of the multitasking user.

Features of the NVIDIA GRID solution, such as the H.264 hardware encoder in the NVIDIA GPU, reduce the display latency from “click to photon,” bringing the experience closer to that of a dedicated PC by speeding the process of capturing the desktop image and compressing it for transmission. For enterprises supporting a modern digital workplace, using the GPU is not just for the OS GUI. Even standard productivity applications such as the new Microsoft Office 2016 increasingly use high performance graphics to support more fluid UX. New browser features like WebGL allow advanced cloud workflows and are accelerated by GPUs. And many companies

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use video streaming for training and company events that need the fast video processing found in GPUs. The Adobe Creative Suite programs are GPU “hogs” and require significant acceleration for a decent user experience. As we saw in the previous section, the GPU provides a measurable improvement for even the typical user.

Today’s workforce, especially millennial now entering the workforce, are accustomed to a graphically rich world – which they access from smartphones, game consoles, cloud services, interactive websites, high resolution displays, etc. This digitally savvy and creative and workforce, has high expectations and will not tolerate poor local UX. Poor UX can lead to lower productivity, decreased job satisfaction or workarounds that open organizations to security risks. A poor UX might be blamed on the network, but more often it’s because the environment does not have the resources to support the applications that are being run. As many companies look to migrate to 10 Enterprise, starting in earnest in 2017, the graphics requirements need to be addressed.

NVIDIA GRID Has the Graphics Power to Drive a Great VDI Experience

One of the best things about running a virtual Windows desktop is that the UX is consistent across multiple platforms, including various operating systems and processor architectures.

To get a firsthand look at NVIDIA GRID, I signed up for a free 24-hour trial and ran the demo applications that included Microsoft Office, Google Earth, Chrome browser, and some higher end professional applications on my main desktop PC. I then tried the demos on any PC, tablet, or smartphone I had access to that could run the VMware client application. The GRID demo is presently running Windows 7, but the experience should translate well to Windows 10.

Whether I was running the Windows 7 virtual desktop on an Apple iPad, an iPhone, an old PC laptop, a new PC desktop, or an Android tablet, the user experience was remarkably consistent. The video playback performance was equally fast and smooth on all these different platforms and did not depend on the actual performance of the client platform itself. This makes working in the virtual environment familiar and more productive across many different clients. One of the great advantages of running a virtual Windows desktop on an Android or iOS tablet is that you can use the full version of Microsoft Office and other productivity software on mobile platforms, not just the simplified Android and iOS versions.

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Figure 3: Screen capture of the GRID Virtual Desktop on an iPad Mini

The greatest difficulty working across platforms is dealing with the various touch screens and display resolutions on the different clients, but the NVIDIA GRID virtual desktop scaled remarkably well for each of these environments. Even the most demanding work tasks, such as a very complex PowerPoint slideshow with animated transitions or a complex design model or a city landscape, ran flawlessly even on a six-year-old Core laptop, an iPhone 6S, and an iPad Mini 2. NVIDIA GRID extends the enterprise IT product lifecycle for client PCs by offloading the heavy GPU lifting and extending the life of older PCs.

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Conclusion

The key to delivering new VDI-based virtual that meet the UX expectations of today’s creative and engaging digital workplace lies in the use of physical GPUs, as enabled in a NVIDIA GRID-powered virtual desktop. Without a GPU, the virtual desktop would attempt to render detailed graphics found in a complex PowerPoint transition, Google Earth, streaming video, or CAD drawings using only the virtualized CPU, and it would be impossible to reproduce the smooth flow of the applications and user interfaces found on a physical device. Running modern GUI graphics on the virtualized CPU in 2016 makes little sense when a virtualized GPU can now be integrated into the datacenter. Today’s successful VDI implementation is one that includes a GPU-virtualization underpinning, designed into the solution, like that offered by NVIDIA GRID.

TRY BEFORE YOU BUY

The best way to understand how NVIDIA GRID works is to try it. Go to www.nvidia.com/trygrid and sign up for a 24-hour demo to run the VMware Horizon application on every client system in your support network. You will be amazed at how smooth and consistent the user experience will be. I tested GRID on an iPhone 6S, an iPAD Mini 2, a budget Lenovo laptop from 2012, and a 3- year-old desktop system. In each case, the graphical and productivity workloads ran flawlessly.

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