By Fredrik Brattstig @virtualbrat
February 24 2025
IGEL is here with yet another update to the IGEL AVD App, this time introducing H.264 hardware accelerated graphics. As an additional feature, IGEL also included support for seamless desktop integration of Remote Apps.
This will be a short blog, where the main focus is on the H.264 acceleration of the RDP session. It will help you leverage that vGPU you have invested in, either in your Azure hosted AVD VMs, Your GPU powered Windows 365 hosts, or even in your on-prem AVD workloads using Azure Local and your own hardware GPUs.
I’m seeing very good performance with the newly added support for H.264, and wanted to put it to stress test.
The setup I have is a AVD host-pool in Amsterdam, Netherlands. I have my IGEL OS device in my home office in Sweden. The AVD host is a NC8as T4 v3 size, comes with 8 vCPU and 56GB RAM, and includes a NVIDIA T4 vGPU. I installed the GPU drivers using the Azure host extensions, currently version 1.10.0.0 using this guide: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/windows/n-series-driver-setup
And to add more frames than the standard 30FPS, I followed this article: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows-server/remote/frame-rate-limited-to-30-fps
I also took the time to optimize the GPOs assigned to my AVD host, making sure that H.264 is enabled by default for the entire session.
IGEL OS 12 and the IGEL AVD App is installed on an Acer Veriton VN2590G, which is very well suited for IGEL OS and heavy workloads. It is probably over the to to what is required for this demo, but its always good to have some spare cycles!
I’m also using the IGEL advanced device redirection to forward the USB attached X52 Joystick, which is done on VID:PID. Flight controls is super smooth!
As a courtesy of the Microsoft PM’s and Developers we are working with, what can be better than, in Microsoft Flight Simulator, using IGEL OS device connecting to Azure Virtual Desktop, to do a flyby of building 83, at the Microsoft campus in
Redmond, WA!?!
The session is in FullHD 1920×1080 resolution.
Now, let’s look at the video!
That’s it for today! Happy flying with IGEL and Microsoft!
/Fred
VirtualBrat 