Hello,
I have performance problems with playback of videos in my VDI machines. I’m using Blast Extreme accelerated by a Nvidia P40 GPU. Playback is always a little bit stuttering. I usually get a better result from my Linux VDI pool that isn’t GPU accelerated. If I check with youtube the problem seems to be related with encoding since I don’t se dropped frames reported by the video player.
What is your experience in fullscreen video playback with the P series?
Cristiano
Hi,
I’m having no issues and super smooth playback even with 4k and Youtube with P40. Which browser are you using?
If you would using a Maxwell board I would assume the issue is related to decoding but Pascal already supports VP9 hardware decoding (used from Youtube) so that this cannot be the issue.
What OS and resolution are you using?
Regards
Simon
Hello Simon,
I’m using W10 64 1709 with 3 cpu and 5GB of Ram, storage is all flash. The profile is just a P40-1Q since I’m going for density. I’ve tried with edge firefox and chrome, aeme issue. Decoding the video from youtube shouldn’t be the issue, I don’t see dropped frames. The issue is not just youtube, every video app is a little bit jerky. I also tried the Nvidia lab, that is available with registration and playback is smooth there. I have also an SR open with VMware, so I’m working on multiple fronts.
regards
Cristiano
Hi Cristiano,
could you please change the scheduler from default (equal share) to best effort for your deployment and test once again? I’m curious to hear if it makes any difference.
regards
Simon
Hello Simon,
Wen I will upgrade to 5.2 I will try that, since it requires a restart. Right now is difficult for me to find a windows for downtime
Regards
Cristiano
Hello Simon,
didn’t switch mode, but GPU wise it seems ok, those are the statistics:
GPU Session Process Codec H V Average Average
1 11 996 H.264 1710 1008 92 4469
1 11 996 H.264 1710 1008 77 5875
1 11 996 H.264 1710 1008 82 4556
1 11 996 H.264 1710 1008 73 4962
1 11 996 H.264 1710 1008 71 4394
1 11 996 H.264 1710 1008 80 4421
1 11 996 H.264 1710 1008 82 4129
1 11 996 H.264 1710 1008 93 3806
1 11 996 H.264 1710 1008 83 4308
1 11 996 H.264 1710 1008 76 4450
so it seems that encoding is fine. Are 80/90 FPS not a little too much?
Also decoding should be fine as youtube doesn’t report dropped frames.
Regards
Cristiano
Hi Cristiano,
it depends on the scheduler. As default scheduler has no FRL it renders more than 60fps.
You can switch to best effort to have FRL=60fps which is more than sufficient. And I agree that the GPU cannot be the issue in your case as we render more than enough frames :)
Regards
Simon
Try using the GRID 5.1 drivers instead.
I`m experiencing the same problem that Christiano mentioned before.
We got Tesla P40 GPU`s in an Horizon environment in version 7.4.0 on ESXi Hosts (HPE DL380G10) in version 6.5U1.
I´ve already switched the scheduler to best effort, but did not see a difference.
I am using 2 full hd monitors and the blast extreme protocol.
The vGPU profile i am using is "grid_p40-2q".
This is the output i get from the hypervisor shell when i run "nvidia-smi vgpu -es":
This output was generated while playing a YouTube video through firefox.
At the first "7 fps" lines the video was not startet, it startet later when those fps counters rose.
It seems like the GPU is rendering way too much frames, but i thought it is limited due to the best effort scheduler…
0 230381 34 2264 H.264 1920 1080 7 333
0 230381 35 2264 H.264 1920 1080 7 443
0 230381 34 2264 H.264 1920 1080 7 333
0 230381 35 2264 H.264 1920 1080 7 339
0 230381 34 2264 H.264 1920 1080 7 332
0 230381 35 2264 H.264 1920 1080 7 348
0 230381 34 2264 H.264 1920 1080 15 958
0 230381 35 2264 H.264 1920 1080 8 838
0 230381 34 2264 H.264 1920 1080 126 735
0 230381 35 2264 H.264 1920 1080 43 1253
0 230381 34 2264 H.264 1920 1080 1188 646
0 230381 35 2264 H.264 1920 1080 30 516
0 230381 34 2264 H.264 1920 1080 122 706
0 230381 35 2264 H.264 1920 1080 27 475
0 230381 34 2264 H.264 1920 1080 108 1160
0 230381 35 2264 H.264 1920 1080 12 473
0 230381 34 2264 H.264 1920 1080 78 1234
0 230381 35 2264 H.264 1920 1080 7 279
0 230381 34 2264 H.264 1920 1080 58 1167
0 230381 35 2264 H.264 1920 1080 7 229
Any advice on how to fix this?
Hi prinz,
could you run "nvidia-smi encodersessions" within the VM?
For me it works as expected with P40-2Q and best effort playing a FullHD FULL screen youtube video:
0 6 1516 H.264 1920 1200 59 2664
0 6 1516 H.264 1920 1200 37 2762
0 6 1516 H.264 1920 1200 56 2965
0 6 1516 H.264 1920 1200 58 2887
0 6 1516 H.264 1920 1200 60 2851
0 6 1516 H.264 1920 1200 59 3063
0 6 1516 H.264 1920 1200 60 2993
0 6 1516 H.264 1920 1200 60 3104
Regards
Simon
I wonder about the effectiveness of the 1Q profile for full 4K video. I’ve been looking at the difference between P6-1Q, P6-2Q and P6-4Q profiles and video performance. 4Q is super smooth, but with 2Q there is roughly a 25% drop in performance and with a 1Q profile a further 25% drop from there.
I have default scheduler settings and have put this down to simple frame buffer capacity but something doesn’t sit right with me in that the software encoding engine (Blast in this case) is still doing the same number of pixels (the same video is being used) so why should the frame buffer make such a difference?
Hello Simon,
i ran the command "nvidia-smi encodersessions" within the VM while playing a YouTube 1080p video and got that output:
0 9 1056 H.264 1920 1080 0 0
0 10 1056 H.264 1920 1080 31 840
0 9 1056 H.264 1920 1080 0 0
0 10 1056 H.264 1920 1080 35 768
0 9 1056 H.264 1920 1080 0 0
0 10 1056 H.264 1920 1080 31 805
0 9 1056 H.264 1920 1080 696 1232
0 10 1056 H.264 1920 1080 31 703
0 9 1056 H.264 1920 1080 36 741
0 9 1056 H.264 1920 1080 143 1190
0 10 1056 H.264 1920 1080 32 708
0 9 1056 H.264 1920 1080 722 1113
0 10 1056 H.264 1920 1080 32 750
0 9 1056 H.264 1920 1080 119 1137
0 10 1056 H.264 1920 1080 36 781
0 9 1056 H.264 1920 1080 145 1144
0 10 1056 H.264 1920 1080 38 811
0 9 1056 H.264 1920 1080 116 1170
0 10 1056 H.264 1920 1080 34 723
If i connect to the desktop-pool with only one active monitor and watch the exact same video in fullscreen, i get that output:
0 7 13076 H.264 1920 1080 740 1339
0 7 13076 H.264 1920 1080 749 1324
0 7 13076 H.264 1920 1080 0 0
0 7 13076 H.264 1920 1080 110 999
0 7 13076 H.264 1920 1080 130 1201
0 7 13076 H.264 1920 1080 0 0
0 7 13076 H.264 1920 1080 0 0
0 7 13076 H.264 1920 1080 0 0
0 7 13076 H.264 1920 1080 0 0
0 7 13076 H.264 1920 1080 0 0
0 7 13076 H.264 1920 1080 0 0
0 7 13076 H.264 1920 1080 0 0
0 7 13076 H.264 1920 1080 0 0
0 7 13076 H.264 1920 1080 0 0
0 7 13076 H.264 1920 1080 0 0
0 7 13076 H.264 1920 1080 121 1111
0 7 13076 H.264 1920 1080 256 3903
0 7 13076 H.264 1920 1080 0 0
0 7 13076 H.264 1920 1080 0 0
0 7 13076 H.264 1920 1080 0 0
On the hypervisor it looks like this when i play the video with one active monitor:
0 855153 17 13076 H.264 1920 1080 115 1469
0 855153 17 13076 H.264 1920 1080 115 1372
0 855153 17 13076 H.264 1920 1080 144 6922
0 855153 17 13076 H.264 1920 1080 128 1252
0 855153 17 13076 H.264 1920 1080 120 1168
0 855153 17 13076 H.264 1920 1080 116 1657
0 855153 17 13076 H.264 1920 1080 1736 135
0 855153 17 13076 H.264 1920 1080 115 1240
0 855153 17 13076 H.264 1920 1080 122 1337
0 855153 17 13076 H.264 1920 1080 124 1346
If i run "nvidia-smi vgpu -q" on the hypervisor, I can see the line "Frame Rate Limit: 60FPS", but it does not limit anything if i get this right…
Regards,
Dominik
Hi Dominik,
I agree this looks like you don’t have FRL in place. Could you please double check that you’re running Best Effort scheduler? Try the latest GRID6.1 package and you should have Best Effort by default…
Regards
Simon
Hi Simon,
so I ran this command on the hypervisor to set the best effort scheduler and rebooted the hosts:
esxcli system module parameters set -m nvidia -p "NVreg_RegistryDwords=RmPVMRL=0x00"
But I dont see any difference. The frame rates are still way to high.
The question is, on which layer the problem occurs first.
It can be the hypervisor, the VM config, the Guest OS or the NVIDIA driver on the OS.
So i set the preference on the lowest layer, which should be fine.
I read the installation manual multiple times and I cant figure out any config errors done by me.
I have to correct that we are now on ESXi 6.5U2, maybe there is a known bug or problem?
We are on the latest GRID 6.1 software (host driver version: 390.57).
UPDATE: I did further investigation and noticed a very interesting benchmark behaviour. This was tested with the Unigine Valley Benchmark. While the benchmark is running, the FPS-Counter in the application tells, that you are almost fixed at 67/68 sometimes 70FPS, while the hypervisor (nvidia-smi vgpu -es) tells you this:
0 311288 7 2256 H.264 1920 1080 140 901
0 311288 8 2256 H.264 1920 1080 7 161
0 311288 7 2256 H.264 1920 1080 102 984
0 311288 8 2256 H.264 1920 1080 7 303
0 311288 7 2256 H.264 1920 1080 94 785
0 311288 8 2256 H.264 1920 1080 7 202
0 311288 7 2256 H.264 1920 1080 104 773
0 311288 8 2256 H.264 1920 1080 7 673
0 311288 7 2256 H.264 1920 1080 103 875
0 311288 8 2256 H.264 1920 1080 7 333
0 311288 7 2256 H.264 1920 1080 107 823
0 311288 8 2256 H.264 1920 1080 7 154
0 311288 7 2256 H.264 1920 1080 125 792
0 311288 8 2256 H.264 1920 1080 7 421
0 311288 7 2256 H.264 1920 1080 125 790
0 311288 8 2256 H.264 1920 1080 7 1096
0 311288 7 2256 H.264 1920 1080 87 759
0 311288 8 2256 H.264 1920 1080 2010 152
0 311288 7 2256 H.264 1920 1080 109 835
0 311288 8 2256 H.264 1920 1080 7 184
The benchmark feels like the frames are dropping very hard, but the FPS-Counter and the hypervisor tells you, that there are no frame-drops at all. Where/what can be the cause of this odd behaviour?
ANOTHER UPDATE: I imported the View GPOs and set the MaxFPS-Blast GPO to 60 fps. It feels much much smoother now, but the frame rates are still pretty high and you can feel some sort of "lag" if you move windows quick or even in some video sequences, but no comparison to before (Max 30 FPS).
So I think the main problem is found and stupid simple.
But for the fine tuning and the problem with the high fps I would be very pleased if I get further help here.
Thank you for your helpful advice and effort!
Regards,
Dominik
What are the min QP and max QP settings in the Blast Extreme session?
And are you using UDP or TCP?
The QP settings are the default ones. We tried UDP and TCP, but there is no noticeable difference. I dont think, that this problem is a Blast setting. My guess is, that the frame rate limiter on the hypervisor is not working correctly. Blast displays only 60FPS due to the GPO I set, but the hypervisor renders way more frames than this. This is very bad for the user experience and of course also the user density, since one user could claim nearly all the performance of that physical GPU.
Hi Prinz,
I disagree. Let’s discuss this offline. Please send me a PM.
regards
Simon
I’m having the same results as others on this forum with Horizon blast (7.7) stuttering playback with H264 encoding enabled. We are using P40 cards, using 4Q and grid driver 412.16. Was this ever resolved?
This sounds similar to my issue.
Any solution?
I have the same issue