NVIDIA GRID vGPU Technology

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The world of graphics just got a whole lot bigger with today’s launch of a tech preview from Citrix featuring the latest breakthrough in graphics innovation — NVIDIA GRID vGPU. NVIDIA GPUs have been providing gamers with amazing experiences for decades. Professional designers have been using our graphics to design everything from soda bottles to supersonic aircraft nearly as long. Now, for the first time, businesses can offer their employees all the benefits of modern graphics on the desktop — virtually — thanks to NVIDIA GRID vGPU.
 
It sounds like it works over a hypervisor. Can someone wiser than me in the ways of virtualization fill me in... Will we be able to leverage vGPU in windows, and would it require having an expensive home server with virtualization?
 
TheHobbyist said:
It sounds like it works over a hypervisor. Can someone wiser than me in the ways of virtualization fill me in... Will we be able to leverage vGPU in windows, and would it require having an expensive home server with virtualization?
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It means you can run virtual machines and have full access to the gpu on the virtual machines. From the sound of it, more than one virtual machine can access the gpu at the same time. Since I haven't run into any real situation where one has so much GPU performance available you want to share it, the real benefit for actual work and stuff is the ability to have virtual workstations. For example if a university had a media lab with fire breathing workstations rather than the budget PCs in the general purpose labs, they could run the hypervisor on the machine and perhaps set up thumb drives that would permit students to just drop in and get their preferred desktop experience for getting their work done and still have full zorch 3d acceleration. Similar if you are say boeing, or somthing similar where the engineering of your products occurs all around the globe. You can now shuffle people around and have them take their workstation setup with them virtually. Side benefit is you get more power than a laptop might give you, and no risk of having it seized at the border to be searched.

I'm sure there are other cool uses, like cude/openCL accelerated computing available to researchers on a time shared box with lots of cards crammed in that you can let them do all sorts of crazy stuff by sequestering their antics inside a virtual environment.
 
Didn't Valve mention once that they've been working to bring something like this over to gaming? Something about you'll have 1-2 GPUs in a machine and 4-8 people will be able to play the game off a single GPU (e.g., LAN party or whatever).
 
jwcalla said:
Didn't Valve mention once that they've been working to bring something like this over to gaming? Something about you'll have 1-2 GPUs in a machine and 4-8 people will be able to play the game off a single GPU (e.g., LAN party or whatever).
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Don't all consoles basically already do that? Splitting the screen 2 or 4 way and then rendering separate screens seems like what you are talking about.

This sounds more like the resources of a video card are split to separate virtual machines, and the virtual machines can then use those video card resources for completely separate things. One might be rendering something in opengl, another in directx, and another might be using CUDA for complex physics simulation.
 
This would benefit the idea of having a single main processing computer per network. Commonly we have a singular workstation per user, and unless a person is pushing the system to it's limits constantly, it is not being fully utilized. Add up all the unused GPU potential across a network, and you can extrapolate how much hardware you are not using, but paid for. This technology allows such a network to efficiently add just the right amount of power, for the least amount of cost, quickly, simply, and easily. Well done nVidia, this is a more important future technology than I believe of Mantle.

I live near what used to be Ati, in Canada, so I'm a fan of them, so get Mantle up and running!
 
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I'm looking forward to moving the computers into a server and not having 5 or 6 workstations running.
 
AMD cards allow themselves to be assigned to multiple different VMs already. Only nvidia disables this functionality on their gaming cards.
 
bAMtan2 said:
AMD cards allow themselves to be assigned to multiple different VMs already. Only nvidia disables this functionality on their gaming cards.
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I think you're missing the point. Having a bunch of VMs use one GPU isn't new, eg RemoteFX. But all current solutions teh VM gets some limited feature set drver, eg RemoteFX supports up to DX9 and in general is good for desktop effects and super simple stuff. vGPU is a single GPU and each VM is running the full Nvidia driver with DX11/OGL4.4 and is equal to a non-VM in what it can run.
 
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