Hello all - we are continuing with out POC of K2’s with Xenapp 6.5 (2008 R2) on ESXi 6.0.
I can say for sure we have vGPU working, drivers are installed properly. I can run Google Earth and definitely see GPU usage, and see the speed increase on the User Session.
The big problem I’m having right now is Google Earth is about the only application I’m seeing Graphics acceleration in. I can force Google Chrome to use graphical acceleration by going to chrome://flags and forcing hardware acceleration. However that is a per user setting - its not natively picking up the fact there is a GPU. I cannot get Office, IE, or any other app on the Windows Desktop to be accelerated (Explorer isn’t either). This leads me to believe I may have a driver issue as windows is not Natively picking up the fact there is a GPU.
I have GPO’s that "disable" the office and explorer "Use Software Rendering only" settings, but there is no way to force Hardware acceleration actually on via GPO. I have a case open with Citrix - but we observed the same issue when using RDP so they are saying its not a Citrix issue.
Did you use tooling such as GPU-Z (GPU-Z Graphics Card GPU Information Utility) to take a look at the actual load of the GPU while using graphics intensive applications? Also IE has the ability to use the GPU as well. Perhaps it’s not a driver issue but a Windows Guest config issue. Did you try a vanilla VM, no GPO’s or pre installed configurations?
Did you use tooling such as GPU-Z (GPU-Z Graphics Card GPU Information Utility) to take a look at the actual load of the GPU while using graphics intensive applications? Also IE has the ability to use the GPU as well. Perhaps it’s not a driver issue but a Windows Guest config issue. Did you try a vanilla VM, no GPO’s or pre installed configurations?
Hello -I am using nvidia-smi in esxi and GPUShark to display GPU load, it does that just fine. Again, I can see the load when using Google Earth and Chrome(#ignore-gpu-blacklist)
I can try a Vanilla VM really quick - though running through RSOP on my Xenapp Server I am not seeing any policies that would affect it.
Yes, I have configured the WPF registry settings in Multi Monitor Hooks. Looks like I have the same problem in just vanilla 2008 R2 though (no Citrix) - which leads me to believe its perhaps a RemoteFX configuration problem.
I have a 2012 R2 setup running 7.8 on the same host and it all works perfectly. This may just be a 2008 R2 problem.
RDP disables all HW acceleration unless you make a full RemoteFX connection to a Virtual Desktop, in RDSH it’s completely unavailable even if a GPU is present.
Citrix enables it within XenApp and so does VMware in their RDSH solution
The most likely cause of what you’re seeing is due to changes in the Chrome release.
In the past we’ve seen situations where an update has disabled GPU acceleration when used in RDSH, and then again in other releases we’ve seen the flags needed change only for a later release to switch it all back.
It’s possible that it’s doing a degree of OS and access detection since it’s disabling it in 2008R2, but 2012R2 it’s running fine.
Office and IE also have a habit of doing OS and RDSH detection and turning stuff off. I suspenct that your being bound to 2008R2 is making matters worse since all the new features and enhancements land in the new releases…
If you can run OpenGL and DirectX applications in a XenApp (As much as I dislike it Unigene Valley would do both) then you have the environment set up correct and it’s the aplication that’s misbehaving.
Thanks for the response Jason. I’ve often found L1 Citrix support is not exactly up on the latest Citrix Technology :)
I am able to use Unigine in DirectX and OpenGL, so as you mentioned, I believe the environment is correctly setup. We do see a significant performance improvement in Chrome when using the GPU when forced to do so.
At this point I’m going to inform our Team that we can provide accelerated browsing using Chrome and maybe some Adobe products on 2008 R2, but otherwise we’ll want to deploy the solution to Customers using XenApp 7.6+ with 2012 R2 for the full benefit.
I keep a list of known issues - some Chrome changes and other reasons hardware GPU usage is not being enabled on various applications / platforms… there’s a link to Chrome in this list…