Teradici, the developer of the PCoIP® protocol, has announced the release of two updates to their hardware acceleration products that are geared to optimize protocol bandwidth and improve end user experience.

In the public announcement released today released “updates to the Teradici PCoIP Hardware Accelerator (APEX) with a new 2.3 driver release that will complement a physical GPU in VMware Horizon View environments and add caching support to optimize bandwidth. The Teradici PCoIP Hardware Accelerator offloads PCoIP image encoding tasks and reduces server CPU utilization. The 2.3 driver update enables IT managers to cut bandwidth usage by up to 50 percent.”

The APEX 2800 acceleration card is designed to offload the protocol encoding tasks from the CPU, resulting in increased user density, while maintaining consistent end user virtual desktop experience.

Teradici
Image by Teradici

The new caching driver, enabled on both the server and client, reduces the overall pixel refresh and the amount of data required to be re-rendered on the client device.  Enabling this driver, Teradici states there is a potential bandwidth savings of up to 50 percent, and we can assume a greater percentage over those environments that use a software only client to connect to their Horizon View desktops.

Desktop applications are evolving and are including more graphical elements, such as live-motion and 3D rendered images.  These application types have historically been challenging to deploy in any desktop or presentation virtualization environment because they use a generic video driver in order to be able to present on standard video cards typically found in servers.  Engineering and Financial Services industries have some of the most graphically demanding applications (AutoCAD, Market Data/Modeling) that usually require the use of higher end desktops.  Virtual GPU (vGPU) implementations leverage physcial GPU cards installed in the server and map them one-to-one to virtual desktop sessions to give the users near-local like video performance.  VMware’s Horizon View has two methods to accomplish this; Virtual Dedicated Graphics Acceleration (vDGA) where there is one GPU dedicated to a virtual desktop and best fits those use cases that require high end video rendering.  The second is Virtual Shared Graphics Acceleration (vSGA) where multiple virtual desktop sessions share the resources of a single GPU.  In this scenario the virtual desktop uses a combination of software and hardware acceleration based on application need and GPU resource availability.  The Teradici APEX card and the new driver enhances this capability and quality of the 3D rendering, increasing the volume of pixels that are encoded and delivered to the client.  An added benefit from the graphics offloading is the increased user density that comes with more available CPU cycles.

The 2.3 driver will be released on Teradici’s support site on August 20, 2013 (http://techsupport.teradici.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=15164).  See the full press release here http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20130813005374/en