Your desktop will be a rich DX11-based experience, and your virtual GPU should be too

re: Your desktop will be a rich DX11-based experience, and your virtual GPU should be too

rbrocks — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 19:57:08 GMT

Yes, just for giggles, I tried using 2012 as a guest as well. I wasn't holding out much hope that it would work since you can't use 2008 R2 SP1 as a guest either, but I tried it anyway. I understand that Microsoft employees aren't allowed to talk about some things regarding prerelease software, but I don't understand why they would release a release candidate and advertise (in this very article) certain features for that release candidate while simultaneously not releasing the version of the software that has those features and apparently trying to distract people from the very obvious elephant in the room by keeping mum on the subject. The whole point of releasing these mile markers to the public is to generate interest in the product as well as productive feedback for development teams to focus their efforts. I already know that compression performance has been majorly improved between the CP and RP when dealing with native hardware. I would like to test to see if that is also the case in a virtualized environment. It's just kind of difficult to do that if I don't have the proper bits...

re: Your desktop will be a rich DX11-based experience, and your virtual GPU should be too

trentzb — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 16:33:06 GMT

I can confirm that I don't see RemoteFX in Windows8ReleasePreview as a Hyper-V VM and don't see Enterprise available anywhere as of yet. Oddly I don't even see RemoteFX in Server 2012 RC as a Hyper-V VM either.

re: Your desktop will be a rich DX11-based experience, and your virtual GPU should be too

rbrocks — Wed, 20 Jun 2012 07:23:31 GMT

In this case, Virtual GPUs refer to what amounts to a virtual extension of a hardware GPU in to a virtual machine. It allows, for instance, you to create a virtualized desktop infrastructure that is fully backed by GPU hardware installed in your servers. This would give you the ability to work with graphics intensive software packages, like 3D AutoCAD. In the case of RemoteFX, I believe (correct me if I'm wrong here guys) that it is also used to offload certain compute intensive items, like compression.

Eric, any chance on some insight as to how I would get my hands on a copy of Enterprise so that I may continue my evaluation of all of your wonderful RemoteFX optimization work? The ISOs that I've seen only have Professional..

re: Your desktop will be a rich DX11-based experience, and your virtual GPU should be too

Yuck — Sun, 17 Jun 2012 13:07:26 GMT

What is Virtual GPU anyway? I know virtual ram which is paging file but this?

re: Your desktop will be a rich DX11-based experience, and your virtual GPU should be too

rahvintzu — Sat, 16 Jun 2012 05:49:54 GMT

Thanks for the additional info Eric.

re: Your desktop will be a rich DX11-based experience, and your virtual GPU should be too

rbrocks — Fri, 15 Jun 2012 03:43:26 GMT

I suppose there's probably more to the RemoteFX components in the OS than simply the graphics driver in device manager. That was what I was referring to at the time. Anyway, I would love to install the Enterprise Edition of the Release Preview, however I am not seeing that as an option. I have downloaded both the available x64 and x86 ISOs from TechNet as well as those publically available. They seem to be the same ISOs, giving "Release Preview" and "Windows 8" as installation options. Based on feature set available after installation, the "Release Preview" option seems to be Professional and the "Windows 8" option seems to be Home (or what ever it is that you guys will be calling the lower end version at release). Am I just downloading the wrong ISOs or did someone mess this up? I'm confused because I was able to mess with features like Direct Access and RemoteFX in the CP (both, I believe, to be exclusive features of Enterprise), so I don't know why you guys wouldn't let us mess with those features in the RP..

re: Your desktop will be a rich DX11-based experience, and your virtual GPU should be too

Eric (MSFT) — Thu, 14 Jun 2012 23:47:50 GMT

To rahvintzu's question, we support HLSL 5. In terms of OpenGL, that is not hardware accelerated. For example, there is not 2.0 or later support for OGL. No comments on future releases, as there's so much to talk about still here. :).

To rbrock's question, make sure you're using an Enterprise edition of the win8 client in this testing. Please let me know if you meant something else by "drivers". Thanks for the kudos.

re: Your desktop will be a rich DX11-based experience, and your virtual GPU should be too

rbrocks — Thu, 14 Jun 2012 07:42:55 GMT

The drivers seem to be missing in both the Windows 8 RP media as well as the Hyper-V integration services disk for a RDVH deployment of RemoteFX (at least, on the media released to Technet on release day). I assume that this isn't intentional, by the content of this post. Can we get a fix to this ASAP, please? On another note, I must give you all kudos on your RemoteFX work, to date. I watched a full motion 720p video over RDP (connecting to a 4 year old Dell workstation) on a 65ms, 1.6mb/sec link and it was almost flawless.

re: Your desktop will be a rich DX11-based experience, and your virtual GPU should be too

rahvintzu — Thu, 14 Jun 2012 06:04:40 GMT

What shader and open GL version support will be offered?

Also will an OSX and IOS Remotefxv2 application be made available?