NVIDIA has published a series of new videos showing off its GRID technology in action on the desktop and in a number of professional applications utilizing both Virtual Dedicated Graphics Acceleration vDGA and Virtual Shared Graphics Acceleration vSGA from VMWare. The green team and VMWare worked alongside networking specialists Cisco to enable a "rich virtualized desktop" experience for end users.
While VDI adoption has been rapidly expanding as companies recognize the benefits that VDI solutions provide in terms of data security, ease of management and deployment flexibility, the lack of dedicated graphics hardware has limited its ability to provide the high quality user experience that end users expect in a desktop environment. vSGA solutions using GRID aims to bring the benefits of faster response times to graphics intensive software and improve employee mobility by offloading complex graphic calculations to specialized servers using virtualized GPU technology. NVIDIA boasts that important user experience factors such as latency is minimized and reliability is also designed into the systems to offer 24/7 operation.
The selection of new demonstration videos from Nvidia includes users experiencing much smoother operating speeds and interaction in apps like Adobe Photoshop CS6, AutoCAD and even Google Maps (including street view etc). Nvidia says that the applications running using GRID and vSGA provide the response and fluidity that professionals would expect on workstations with powerful GPUs built-in. What is more the virtual GPU provided to different users is configurable according to their needs.
Knowledge workers and "light GPU users" can probably be best served by shared GPUs on the vSGA GRID system. However users like architects, designers and engineers can have a dedicated virtual GPU setup so they can use GPU power hungry apps on the move, on their tablet or smartphone for instance, wielding the power of a traditional desktop GPU system on the go. Benefits for the organisation deploying this technology include having centralised security and management while maintaining high performance for workstation apps.
As a reminder Nvidia is also leveraging its GRID technology for its cloud "any device" gaming system.
