I recently tested vDGA and - i was really disappointed. The frames per second rate is far below requirements of engineers (<15fps on 1 monitor). This result was not expected at all and does not match the advertising videos by VMWare (on one video you see 50-60fps in the upper right corner while running a game?!)
The environment:
Proliant DL380p gen8 with Dual CPU E2650 (2Ghz) with 128GB RAM and 2x 146 SAS HDs 15k, Gigabit Network
ESXi v5.5, View 5.3. nVida Quadro K2000 has been successfully linked to 1 VM via pci-passthrough on a host (no other vms were installed on this host).
All required BIOS-Settings on Server have been done. Installed OS on VM was Windows 7 x64 Enterprise, recent nVidia driver and vmview agent as well as feature pack 5.3 installed.
VM has been placed into a VMVIEW-Pool. Within VM, the SVGA Adapter has been deactivated in Windows device manager. Connection to VM via a ZeroClient (Wyse P25) has been successfully established. DXDiag shows Quadro K2000 as primary GPU and Passmark recognizes the gpu - any test from DirectX9 to DirectX11 runs successfuly - results are as expeced.
Conclusion: vDGA has been successfully established.
But: The frame rate is below 15 frames per second in average (peak max. 19fps) while running a video or moving windows around. The Process pcoip_server_win32 runs at about 15% in Average, Maximum peak was 40% (using 2 vCPUs). I think this service is responsible for encoding PCoIP Packets. I have prioritized this process from "High" to "RealTime" - without any performance improvements.
Implementing PCoIP GPO and setting higher frame rate (120 instead of 30), modifying the PCoIP-bandwidth settings and reducing PCoIP initial image quality as well as adding vCPUs (from 2 to 4) and all other settings suggested by documents from VMWare or Teradici to the VM didn't show any significant video improvements. Connecting 2 Monitors results in 8 fps in average...
Is it possible to speed up PCoIP encoding within Windows Session?? I think this is the bottleneck! In Citrix you are able to set a registry key to accelerate Software-Encoding.
Or is there another workaround or known setting which helps to accelerate the fps? Thank you in advance for your help.
Below you see ZeroClient Statistics on Wyse/Dell P25 while running a FullSized YouTube Video...
