NVIDIA GRID Unleashes Graphics for Virtualized Desktops

NVIDIA today announced that it is unleashing the full graphics potential of enterprise desktop virtualization with the availability of NVIDIA GRID vGPU integrated into Citrix XenDesktop 7. NVIDIA GRID vGPU technology addresses a challenge that has grown in recent years with the rise of employees using their own notebooks and portable devices for work. These workers have increasingly relied on desktop virtualization technologies for anytime access to computing resources, but until now this was generally used for the more standard enterprise applications. Performance and compatibility constraints had made it difficult for applications such as building information management (BIM), product-lifecycle management (PLM) and video-photo editing.

Two decades ago hardware-based graphics replaced software emulation. Desktop virtualization solutions stood alone as the only modern computing form without dedicated graphics hardware. As a result, an already busy virtualized CPU limited performance and software emulation hampered application compatibility. The situation began to improve a year ago with the introduction of the non-virtualized GPU in Citrix XenServer. But efficiency gains were limited because each user still required a dedicated GPU.