By Fredrik Brattstig @virtualbrat
I have been in the computer industry for too long! And due to too much real work, this blog has been on my list for a long time, but now was the time.
If you are a computer enthusiast as I am since 20+ years, you will probably remember the “Quake” series of games by “id software”. “id software” were the pioneers in 3D gaming, with titles like DOOM, Wolfenstein 3D and Quake amongst other titles. “id software created the definition of First Person Shooter (FPS) games.
A bit more than a year ago, Nvidia introduced the Turing based GPU’s which are capable of doing real time raytracing for the game and movie industry. As of being a Nvidia vGPU community advisor, one of my benefits is to test the vGPU (server side) graphics cards, and what could be better to combine work and fun?
About half a year ago Nvidia, id software and Bethesda did a remake to show what the RTX architecture can give to old games as example, Below image shows the difference in image quality when RTX is ON vs OFF
So why not give that a go in a Citrix VM and have a Linux Based IGEL OS-powered UD3 endpoint connecting up with full graphics hardware acceleration in 4K definition?!?
Lab setup:
– Citrix Xenserver 8.1 hypervisor including a Nvidia Tesla T4 vGPU
– MCS provisioned Windows 10 1909 VM, GRID T4-16Q profile attached, Citrix 2003 VDA
– IGEL UD3-LX60 11.04.102tp1 with a 4K monitor, keyboard and mouse
(kbd and mouse is the way to play Quake, forget about the xbox controllers the kids use today)
Nvidia Tesla T4
– 16 GB GDDR6 Framebuffer
– 320+GB/S memory bandwith
– 320 Turing Tensor Cores
– 2560 Nvidia CUDA Cores
– 8,1 TFLOPS FP32
– Power Consumption 70Watts
(no external power, drains power from PCIe port)
https://www.nvidia.com/en-gb/data-center/tesla-t4/
IGEL UD3 (LX60)
– AMD Ryzen R1505G CPU
– 4GB DDR4 RAM
– AMD Radeon Vega 3 Graphics
– 2xDP 4K@60Hz
As of a nostalgic trip and to give ideas of how you could use the combination of, in this case, Nvidia vGPU, Citrix, Microsoft and IGEL OS endpoint, the result is shown in the video below. I do have some flaws in my gaming skills, it was quite some time since I had the chance to practice.
Cool, isn’t it! Lets have a look at the settings applied to the IGEL OS endpoint. For the firmware I’m using, I let the default Citrix Workspace App to be enabled, and that is v 2006 (June 2020 release). I enabled “H.264 Deep Compression Codec” and enabled “Accelerated H.264 Deep Compression Codec”
When playing games in remote sessions, mouse movements behaves strange, as the session think that you are moving a mouse pointer, in this case, when having free look in a game there is a trick to enable Relative Mouse, a setting found in the IGEL OS registry
And I also disabled EDT over UDP. Until now the best H.264 performance is achieved using TCP only
Except for the mentioned setting, I basically only pointed out where my storefront is located and added the root certificate to avoid SSL issues.
On the Citrix server-side here are the policy’s applied:
That’s it! Stay safe and well out there and KEEP DISTANCE!
With Love!
/Fred
VirtualBrat 