Heidi Driver doesn't like Nvidia GRID K2 card on Windows Server 2012 R2

[Anonymous]

Hi. 

My office is running in a fully virtualized environment and we just upgraded our VDI server. We now have a Supermicro server with (2) Nvidia Grid K2 cards running Windows Server 2012 R2. Our Virtual Machines are Windows 8.1 on Hyper-V. Drivers on the server are current. Windows 8.1 on the VMs reports all updates are installed.

We use AutoCAD, Revit and 3DS Max in Building Design Suite Premium (2014 & 2015) and both revit and Max love the new cards. Full graphics acceleration and everything. AutoCAD however is throwing us a "Heidi driver cannot be loaded error" and switches to software emulation. This is true both on version 2014 and 2015. Both have all service packs installed. The thing is, performance in software mode is actually worse than it was in our old 2008 server with no graphics cards at all. Jerky and unuseable. 

Does anyone have any light to shed on this ? DXDiag says The RemoteFx drivers are DirectX11, WDDM 1.2 . I thought Windows 8.1 drivers were WDDM 1.3 ? Is there an update available anywhere that I'm not seeing ?

Thanks,

JF

[Anonymous]

Hi jfmonod.

First of all, please check this KB:

http://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/autocad/troubleshooting/caas/sfdcarticles/sfdcarticles/Error-T...

It states that you system must have GPU, real GPU.

As I understand  you are using Hyper-V + RemoteFX (or anything else???), but this will not work because Hyper-V do not support either vGPU or Pass-through GPU to VM. The KB states that, in your case, VM must have real GPU, but RemoteFX is not a real one (just a shim/abstraction level Above real GPU) and work other way to accelerate some graphics API. It's limited in terms of functionality and ACAD need all features of GPU not just  some API calls.

That's why you have this error and you need either to switch from Hyper-V to VMware/Citrix solutions or disable HW acceleration and work in software mode.

[Anonymous]

One small update:

You can switch ACAD from using DX11 to DX9 and this should helps to avoid error message:

http://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/autocad/troubleshooting/caas/sfdcarticles/sfdcarticles/How-to-...

But keep in mind the note at the bottom of the link:

Note: Using DirectX 9 changes the display performance in AutoCAD and can potentially affect how the program runs, depending on the type of drawings you work with. DirectX 11 is more capable than DirectX 9.