View 7.2 with Nvidia GRID, laggy YouTube?

[csledd]

Hey guys,

Here's what I've got. I'm currently running Horizon View 7.2 on ESXi hosts that are running 6.0. The hosts have Nvidia GRID K1 cards. I looked through quite a few guides on how to set this up for best video performance. In the past we were just using SVGA but have started to try to use vGPU. So I added the PCI Shared Nvidia card into the master image by editing the settings, chose a profile, reserved all memory, installed the Direct Connection agent into the master image and used the Horizon View client to connect to the master image and install the Nvidia driver related to the driver installed on the host. I then rebooted and shut down the master image and composed a new pool to test. When I log in, the screen isn't really drawing correctly across my three monitors. If I have it full screen, 2 screens don't load and the 1 screen that does flickers. If I minimize into a window it works fine, but the video quality isn't really that much better. Watching a full screen YouTube video at 720P is unbearable and laggy. Obviously something isn't working correctly. At one point the weird screen problem stopped and just started to work correctly but the video quality was never better. I'm just surprised that this is not working much better than the SVGA. I feel like something has to be not working properly. Any suggestions?

[jmatz135]

Is it actually using the GPU?  If you use a hardware monitor program that tell GPU usage from within the VM is it actually registering the GPU and is it actually being used?

[techguy129]

The K160q and K180q are the only profiles the K1 supports 4 monitors. Be sure you're using those on the image. At a minimum you need to use the K120q profile as their is issues with using under 1GB profiles. Like mentioned, check device manager and make sure the Vm sees the grid card and its being used. Also important, the drivers on the ESXi host must patch the drivers in your image. I can watch 720/1080p fine without Grid when you have the appropriate amount of CPU allocated to the VM. The K1 card is a nice improvement over SVGA and you will notice a performance increase.

Use perfmon and check PCoIP/Blast latency, packet loss, FPS, etc.

Also, check that you aren't capping your performance with any GPO view settings.

[csledd]

I bet the profile is the reason for the screens flickering then. I will test that today and verify that is the problem there. However, since you mentioned being able to watch 720/1080 fine with SVGA with the appropriate amount of CPU, I am not even able to do that. I've only tested with 2 vCPU. I would actually prefer SVGA if possible. All my users need to do is watch training videos and web conference. I know it's going to be relative to the environment and what you're running, but how many vCPU's are you using when watching 720/1080 with SVGA?

[techguy129]

We are using 4 vCPU per Win10 VM. The main reason for 4 vcpu is for the additional resources needed for app volumes mounting at startup but it also benefits the video. I would investigate possible network latency issues / GPO settings.

[csledd]

Thanks! I am testing with 4 vCPU with crappy results and it's a fresh install of Windows 7 so nothing else in the image. We currently do not have a GPO to change any settings, but I can go down that route to see what settings need to be set and test from there. Thanks for the help! I did change the profile and that does correct the screen flickering.