Wednesday, April 15, 2020

NVIDIA Accelerates Windows Remote Desktop

My friends at NVIDIA shared some interesting information with me this week that has the potential of improving your Remote Desktop (RDP) experience... which is critical in our current #WorkFromHome situation due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Most of us have now transitioned from "implementation" to "optimization" mode for remote staff support. Today's post will share this potentially invaluable information, including how it relates to GeForce versus Quardo graphics card!


Keep reading to learn more...

The “Accelerate Windows Remote Desktop” feature below is an extension of a Quadro feature to GeForce users.  Quadro users have always been able to enjoy an accelerated remote OpenGL experience (e.g., Remote Desktop).  Because many users are now forced to work remotely, due to local shelter-in-place ordinances, those who are not on Quadro are experiencing less than ideal OpenGL performance on their remoting stacks.  To enable the many non-Quadro users worldwide who have been forced to work remotely to remain productive, NVIDIA has provided the code below to enable access to OpenGL acceleration while they (i.e. NVIDIA) work on integrating it permanently into the next GeForce driver.

Thus, if you are already on Quadro, there is no further action required.

If you have a GeForce graphics card, you may want to install this NVIDIA drive patch on your remote computer (not your local computer at home).

Learn more via this link:
https://developer.nvidia.com/designworks
Game developers and content creators all over the world are working from home and asking us to help them use Windows Remote Desktop streaming with the tools they use. We've created a special tool for GeForce GPUs to accelerate Windows Remote Desktop streaming with GeForce drivers R440 or later. 
Download and launch the executable as administrator on the Windows Desktop where your OpenGL application will run. A dialog will confirm that OpenGL acceleration is enabled and if a reboot is required.
Here is a direct link to the GeForce driver path: https://developer.nvidia.com/nvidia-opengl-rdp

This Does not Help Revit Performance
Note that this does not help with Autodesk Revit, as it uses DirectX 11, and not OpenGL.

This Might Help Enscape Performance
Ideally, you would use Enscape on a local computer but if it is not powerful enough it will run via remote desktop... with this driver update for GeForce cards. You can read about that, and more, in this Ensacpe blog post I co-authored: COVID-19: WORKING FROM HOME TIPS TO GET YOU THROUGH THE CRISIS; in this article you can learn about installing and activating Enscape on your home computer since the licensing is cloud-based.

Additional Related links:



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