As many of you know by now, I worked on this project with the VXR team at VMware to try to run Augmented and Virtual Reality Applications on VMware vSphere. The white paper demonstrates that, using VMware vSphere backed by NVIDIA Virtual GPU technology, AR/VR applications can be run on a Windows 10 virtual machine with an NVIDIA vGPU, and streamed to a standalone AR/VR device, such as the Oculus Quest or Vive Focus Plus, using NVIDIA’s CloudXR protocol. It was a very interesting project as we had some real challenges I did not expect. I am not going to reveal the outcome of the project and our findings, you will need to read the white paper for that, it will also give you a good understanding of the use cases around these technologies in my opinion. One thing I can reveal right here though is that these workloads are typically graphic intense. I want to share with you one image which in my opinion explains why this is:
Traditional apps/workloads usually run on a single monitor with a frame rate of 30 frames per second. VR applications are presented in a VR headset. A VR headset has a display for both eyes, that doubles the number of megapixels per second immediately, but these displays also expect 72 frames per second or more typically. This is to avoid motion sickness. All of this is described in-depth in the white paper, of course including our findings around GPU utilization when running VR/AR applications using NVIDIA CloudXR, NVIDIA and VMware vGPU on top of VMware vSphere. I hope you enjoy reading the paper as much as I enjoyed the project!
Go here to sign up for the white paper: https://pathfinder.vmware.com/activity/projectvxr