Skip to main content

AMD Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise 18.Q3.1

AMD have released an important new driver for their AMD Radeon Pro GPUs in October 2018.

This release is fixing many major issues that AMD had with Citrix Virtual Apps & Desktops (aka XenDesktop), I am very happy to see that the engineers inside AMD worked hard and now everything is working out of the box and no “tweak” have to be done to get it working. The drivers works both with a physically machine with Radeon Pro + Citrix Virtual Apps & Desktops (aka XenDesktop) or with a Virtual machine where the AMD Radeon Pro GPU are attached as GPU passthrough or sliced via SR-IOV with S7150/S7150x2 with Citrix Virtual Apps & Desktops (aka XenDesktop). I have tested the drivers in my lab with AMD Radeon Pro WX4100 + S7150 and S7150x2 and I can confirm that AMD have fixed below, which is important. I haven’t tested with VMware Horizon yet.

The Radeon™ Pro Software for Enterprise is designed to deliver market-leading uptime and stability. Rigorous multi-wave testing and exhaustive ISV certifications help make this “the industry’s most stable driver”1.  Radeon™ Pro Software is certified in over 100 workstation applications including Autodesk® AutoCAD®, Dassault Systèmes® CATIA®, Siemens NX™, Adobe® Premiere® Pro, Avid® Media Composer®, Autodesk® Maya®, PTC Creo® and many more

Built to help content creators make the best, every Enterprise Edition is designed to deliver more quality, performance, security, and simplicity

Lets Dig in why this is important.

Fixed Issues in 18.Q3.1

  • Locked Clock Speed with AMD Radeon™ Pro WX 7100 may be seen.
  • Dassault Systèmes® Solidworks® 2018 may crash at Customer Site while applying service metal fabrications.
  • “19.Light.vpb” file may show issues while rendering with Autodesk® VRED.
  • Application launching issues with Siemens NX™ 12.0.2 may be observed.
  • Some Viewport Corruption may be seen with Blender®.
  • Some issues may be observed with SPECapc™ Solidworks® 2015.
  • Solid Color Outputting may be seen on display using Specific DP 1.2 to HDMI 2.0 Dongle.
  • Dassault Systèmes® Solidworks® 2018/2017 may stop responding after rotating or changing display style on Windows® 7.
  • DXGI window mode stereo in Stereo 3D may only show left eye image when enabling active/passive stereo in Radeon™ Pro Settings on Windows® 10 RS4.
  • Application may stop responding while using ‘sliced geometry’ feature in Notch.
  • Corruption may be seen on model with change in Anti-aliasing modes with Dassault ICEM Surf™.
  • Display issues may be observed while running Nuke benchmark on AMD FirePro™ W8100 and AMD FirePro™ W9100.
  • Unexpected behaviour may be observed when running Intergraph SmartPlant FreeView on AMD FirePro™ 7150 with Citrix® XenDesktop®.
  • Toggling between full screen and windowed mode on Citrix® XenDesktop® may lead to temporary viewport corruption.
  • On Windows® 7, a Catalyst Control Center error may be observed when resizing Citrix® XenDesktop® window.

Continue reading

Display adapter priority and monitor creation in Citrix sessions

Citrix have created this very important knowledge article CTX237608 about GPUs in Citrix from release 7.16 and forward.

This article is valid for following Citrix products:

  • Citrix XenDesktop 7.16 using Microsoft Windows 10
  • Citrix XenDesktop 7.17 using Microsoft Windows 10
  • Citrix XenDesktop 7.18 using Microsoft Windows 10

(IDD) Indirect Display Driver model was introduced in Microsoft Windows 10 and Citrix is now using this technology.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/display/indirect-display-driver-model-overview 

I experienced myself an issue with an AMD Radeon WX4100 GPU having a black screen or desktop “freezes” at login and by adding CitrixIDD registry key I got it working. Other GPUs may be impacted so please test. Please be aware that with implementing Citrix IDD you loose vendor specific (control panel) settings, because Citrix bypass the GPU vendor capture APIs and you will have less performance resulting in less FPS. But I have experience myself that performance works amazing with enabling CitrixIDD and it solved my issue with a black screen/desktop that froze.

Update 29 August 2018
Its recommended getting a native driver from the GPU vendor instead of using Citrix IDD to get the best performance the GPU vendors provide via their APi.

Below is relevant for Citrix customers

  • Connecting with HDX to machines provisioned manually or MCS or PVS to a virtual Microsoft Windows 10 with Citrix Client OS VDA 7.16 and above.
  • Connecting with HDX using Citrix RemotePC to a physically PC with Microsoft Windows 10 and Citrix Client OS VDA 7.16 and above.

Continue reading

NVIDIA GRID 6.0 released

Hi All

Its time to update your NVIDIA TESLA M6, M10, M60 environment or start using the new TESLA P4, P6, P40, P100, V100 with GRID 6.0

NVIDIA have released new drivers for NVIDIA GRID 6.0 for March 2018.

This release is great as NVIDIA released a 2GB framebuffer for vPC licenses, so customers before couldn only run a framebuffer up to 1GB and now this is increased to 2GB with the new -2B vGPU type that is available for all licenses. Another great thing for cutomers is support for latest Windows 10 fall creators upsdate 1709.

This release includes the following software:

  • NVIDIA GRID Virtual GPU Manager version 390.42 for the Citrix XenServer, VMware vSphere, Huawei UVP
  • NVIDIA Windows driver version 391.09
  • NVIDIA Linux driver version 390.42

Continue reading

NVIDIA GRID – AppGuide (AutoCAD)

Hi All.

I want to share this with you all, Luke Wignall and his team from NVIDIA have created some great AppGuides, that helps with understanding how many users can you put on a NVIDIA GRID system with either K1/K2 in a VMware environment. These guides are made together with vendors such as Autodesk. The guides focus on following apps Autodesk AutoCAD.

In this blogpost my goal is to highlight the great work NVIDIA have done creating the scalability app guides and these guides helps you if you want to virtualize Autodesk AutoCAD 2015 with NVIDIA GRID and VMware Horizon. The guides are great – cause they give an idea what you would require in a virtualized environment and these can be reused for other virtualized platforms such as Citrix and Microsoft – keep in mind that results might be different. If you would like to get more informations about how the setup is configured and which methodology i recommend you read the AppGuide, you can download it in under source in the end of this article.

The appguides gives a great idea to understand the impact of CPU and how the GPU are giving value.

Autodesk-Logo-2013

AutoCAD_2016

About AutoCAD 2015

Autodesk AutoCAD is one of the most globally used software platforms for CAD design and documentation.  AutoCAD leverages both CPU and GPU to deliver a high quality user experience, and as a result, there are several things that need to be considered in architecting your GRID vGPU solution: the size of your map data, the concurrency of your users, and the level of interaction with primary 2D and some 3D data.

Results NVIDIA Appguide for Autodesk AutoCAD 2015

autodesk-nvidia-vmware

The following are results of our testing, looking for the greatest scalability while still within performance expectations.  It’s important to note that your users, your data, and your hardware will impact these results, and you may decide a different level of performance or scalability is required to meet your individual business needs. As the Catalyst benchmark does not push AutoCAD’s GPU capabilities, and was built to push the limits of dedicated hardware versus the shared resources of VDI, the decision was made to stop testing once the CPU was approaching 100% utilized and test times had climbed past twice what we were finding on the a single physical workstation with dedicated resources.  We then met with the Autodesk AutoCAD team, discussed the results, reviewed the tests in action, and physically verified that this was still within what a typical user would deem acceptable and usable. When running AutoCAD, anything higher than 20 FPS is awesome, but users generally don’t notice the difference once you exceed 30 FPS.  However, once you drop below 10 FPS, the software is going to feel very sluggish and become unusable by the time you hit 5 FPS. • 20 fps above is good • Below 10fps – sluggish • 5 fps – unusable

  • 32VM : K220Q perform better than K120Q but K120Q is still maintain avg 31FPS. 
  • 40VM : Due to vGPU configuration, need K120Q, avg FPS is 24 FPS
  • 48VM : one you hit 40 VM running, avg FPS is dropping below 10 FPS. 

AutoCAD requires significant CPU resources, so investing in higher CPU speeds and more cores will pay off on performance and scalability.  For medium to large models, K240Q performance might be better for a real use scenario. Since your own situation is different, you must test with your own models to ensure the most accurate results. The chart below shows a comparison between two different sets of VDI guests, one using the K2 and its K220Q profile, the other a K1 and its similarly sized frame buffer profile, the K120Q:

äutocad2015_scaling-01

Notice that as scale, the number of concurrent VM’s increases, there is an obvious drop in performance, and logs will show this is the CPU becoming 100% utilized.  This is a “peak workload” test as all sessions are started in unison, we would expect humans to be more staggered in their workflow.

The next chart shows results when we add that synthetic human behavior, we delay the launching of each session by 5 seconds, this offsets the tests and prevents all tests hitting the same function and impacting the CPU in unison.

äutocad2015_scaling-02
Notice that with delayed launching, or staggered starts, the performance remains high to a much greater scale of concurrent sessions.

Additional findings from this testing:
vCPU –  2 vCPU are sufficient for this benchmark, however increasing model size and complexity will change this. 
• Virtual System Memory – 2 GB is sufficient for this benchmark, however increasing model size and complexity will change this.  
• K220Q/K120Q  : both show capped FPS caused by frame rate limiting (FRL) 
• vGPU has 45 fps frame limiter for performance balancing across multiple VM

AutoCAD 2015 Users per server

Based on the NVIDIA GRID™ Performance Engineering Lab (GRID P.E.L.) findings, NVIDIA GRID provides the following performance and scalability metrics for Autodesk AutoCAD 2015. These metrics are based on tests with the lab equipment shown in the graphic below, using the Cadalyst benchmark, and in working with Autodesk and their emphasis on end user usability.  Of course, your usage will depend on your models and equipment, so this Application Guide is intended to be used as a starting point for your implementation.

autocad-users-per-server

 

Source

Download the NVIDIA GRID vGPU APPLICATION GUIDE FOR AUTODESK AUTOCAD 2015 ON VMWARE HORIZON here

 

NVIDIA GRID – AppGuide (ArcGIS Pro)

Hi All.

I want to share this with you all, Luke Wignall and his team from NVIDIA have created some great AppGuides, that helps with understanding how many users can you put on a NVIDIA GRID system with a K2 in a VMware environment. These guides are made together with vendors such as ESRI. The guides focus on following apps ESRI ArcGIS Pro.

In this blogpost my goal is to highlight the great work NVIDIA have done creating the scalability app guides and these guides helps you if you want to virtualize ESRI Pro with NVIDIA GRID and VMware Horizon. The guides are great – cause they give an idea what you would require in a virtualized environment and these can be reused for other virtualized platforms such as Citrix and Microsoft – keep in mind that results might be different. If you would like to get more informations about how the setup is configured and which methodology i recommend you read the AppGuide, you can download it in under source in the end of this article.

The appguides gives a great idea to understand the impact of CPU and how the GPU are giving value.

esri

arcgis

About ESRI ArcGIS Pro

ESRI ArcGIS Pro 1.0 is a  Geographic Information Systems (GIS) application for mapping, visualizing, editing, and analyzing spatial data.  Esri recommends a GPU for best end user experience, but as ArcGIS Pro 1.0 also generates heavy CPU load, this also needs to be considered in architecting your vGPU solution.  The size of your map data, the concurrency of your users, and the level of interaction with 3D data all need to be considered when defining your user groups.

Results NVIDIA Appguide for ESRI ArcGis Pro

esri-nvidia-vmware

The following are the full results of our testing.  The baseline was the 45 second draw time sum – anything greater than that value represented a worsening UX while less would be a better UX.  Looking for both performance and scalability, we tested looking for the greatest number of virtual desktops, and therefore the greatest scalability, while still within performance expectations and the threshold of 45 seconds.  It’s important to note that your users, your data, and your hardware will impact these results and you may decide a different level of performance or scalability is required to meet your individual business needs.   Tests were also run to look for potential NUMA issues that can negatively impact performance.  This is where the physical GPU and its PCI-e channels are tied to one physical CPU, while the virtual desktop is running on the other physical CPU, so communication with the physical GPU has to move over the QPI between the two physical CPUs.  This creates a bottleneck and can cause performance issues.  However, in our testing, the application is sufficiently CPU bound that NUMA affinity made little difference. The results in the table below show the decrease in performance as we increased vCPU counts, and then the increase in scalability with synthetic human behavior (think time):

esri-arcgis-users-pr-server-2

ArcGIS – users per server

Based on NVIDIA Performance Engineering Lab findings, NVIDIA GRID provides the following performance and scalability metrics for Esri ArcGIS 3D Pro 1.0. These metrics are based on tests with the lab equipment shown in the graphic below, using the Esri API based “heavy 3D” benchmark and in working with Esri to determine acceptable performance.  Of course, your usage will depend on your models, but this is guidance to help guide your implementation.

esri-arcgis-users-pr-server

Source

Download the NVIDIA GRID vGPU APPLICATION GUIDE FOR ESRI ARCGIS PRO 1.0 – 3D ON VMWARE HORIZON here