>>...is this something that is on the roadmap for the vSGA driver?
I can't really publicly comment specifically on roadmap items. We do want to fully leverage GPU resources when available though and know of areas we can optimize. There is already a lot of optimizations of the 3D pipeline underway which is where the work will need to happen.
>>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:
Honestly, I think this is more advertising the Kepler can handle more than one h.264 encoding stream. This is relevant because remoting is largely a commodity. Everyone in the space is largely moving to h.264 encode / decode and moving away from older JPEG/PNG and wavelet encode/decode. As that happens in the industry its natural for everyone to take advantage of hardware acceleration using general purpose hardware. The Quadro line could only support one h.264 stream so there really is not much value for people moving to h.264 encode/decode early. With K1/2 its now makes a little more sense. I really think its more for this than simultaneous decode / re-encode / transport / decode. Although there can be some value there also.
>>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.
This is what is called their fast readback API. The API does give us really low latency access to what we need from the GPU / Graphics Driver. We do not use this with vSGA. We use it with vDGA.
>>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.
The K1 is designed for higher consolidation per GPU when doing light weight basic 3D. At 100 users per GPU it's like our software rasterizer for Aero / Basic 3D like Office functions Google earth etc. Not workstation class 3D. You just get to offload some CPU off to the GPU and smooth out some of the user experience. The K2 is more for workstation class usage. I think we need servers that can do 2 - 4 K1 cards to see sever consolidations.