No performance improvement with GRID K1

C3dy · April 26, 2017, 6:57am

Dear community members

Our distributor recently sent us a GRID K1 for testing. It was installed in a HPE Proliant DL380 Gen9 running VMWare 6.5.

I have installed vib driver Version 367.92 on the ESXi Host and enabled xORG service on it. The vBIOS Versions are shown below:

GRID K1, 0000:0D:00.0, 80.07.BE.00.02
GRID K1, 0000:0E:00.0, 80.07.BE.00.03
GRID K1, 0000:0F:00.0, 80.07.BE.00.05
GRID K1, 0000:10:00.0, 80.07.BE.00.04

Then I installed a new VM with Server 2012 R2 and Citrix VDA 7.13, connected it to our 7.8 Farm and published a Desktop on it. A k180q vGPU Profile was assigned to the VM. Also NVIDIA Driver 369.95 was installed.

NVIDIA-smi shows me that the VM is using the vGPU:

±----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes: GPU Memory |
| GPU PID Type Process name Usage |
|=============================================================================|
| 0 2288891 C+G shv-117 4064MiB |
±----------------------------------------------------------------------------+

So far so good, I think until this point everything is set up properly (please correct me if I’m wrong).

Then I started to play with citrix policies, which is extremely difficult because there is no reference value for this. I found a Threat here in this forum from a guy who posted his best working settings. The performance got a little better, but I am still not satisfied with the visual performance…

I cannot see a real difference between a Citrix session with or without vGPU, except that it has DirectX and OpenGL support. The framerates with DirectX Benchmarks like Furmark or Unigine Valley are terrible…

I don’t really know whats wrong… and it doesn’t make sense to me buying one ore more GRID cards when there is no performance improvement.

Maybe you guys have some ideas or tipps for me.

Thank you very much, best regards

C3dy

C3dy · April 26, 2017, 8:10am

@Moderators: Could someone Please move this port to the XenApp section? I posted it in the XenApp section by misstake…

sschaber · April 26, 2017, 12:48pm

Hi C3dy,

I assume you missed an important piece to active GPU acceleration for RDS sessions :)

For sure you should see a huge difference.

Best regards

Simon

C3dy · April 27, 2017, 6:33am

Hey Simon

Thank you very much for your answer!

So, I’v already seen the article you posted before. I have set the "enablewpfhook" key, but that made no difference. Also I had a case open at Citrix support because of how to install HDX 3D PRO on VM with vGPU assigned. When installing VDA on a Desktop machine, it gives you the choice to install HDX 3D PRO or not. But in my case, while installing VDA on Server 2012 r2 vGPU enabled VM, the installation Wizard didn’t give me an option.

After some remote sessions, Citrix tech support just told me that HDX 3D PRO is automatically installed when running VDA wizard on server OS… They couldn’t give me any evidence on this…

When I run GPU-Z it first shows me the microsoft basic display adapter, but I have the possibility to switch to the NVIDIA vGPU profile… I uploaded a screenshot.

Also when running HDX Monitor 3.5 it only shows me Graphics-Thinwire, but no thinwire-advanced…

Best regards, Cedy

sschaber · April 27, 2017, 3:19pm

Hi,

I meant this one:
On Windows Server 2012, Remote Desktop Services (RDS) sessions on the RD Session Host server use the Microsoft Basic Render Driver as the default adapter. To use the GPU in RDS sessions on Windows Server 2012, enable the Use the hardware default graphics adapter for all Remote Desktop Services sessions setting in the group policy Local Computer Policy > Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Remote Desktop Services > Remote Desktop Session Host > Remote Session Environment.

Regards

Simon

C3dy · May 1, 2017, 8:30am

Hey Simon

Thanks for your advice. This option was also set about one month ago. Still no performance in Sessions…

I’ve read so many Blogs, troubleshooting guides etc… I don’t know what to do anymore. We asked our distributor if they would change the K1 to a K2, so we could test it with this card.

Do you have some more advices that could help me?

Thanks and best regards

Cedy

sschaber · May 1, 2017, 3:47pm

Hi,

I still have the question if you see GPU load within a RDS session or not. You talk about bad performance but it is not really clear if it is working at all. Feel free to send me a PM with your contact details and I’ll do my best to support.

Regards

Simon