VMware Horizon Inventor 2014 perfect, Inventor 2016 poor performance

[Anonymous]

Hi there,

we are using very successfuly Inventor 2014 on severals ESXi Servers with NVidia Grid K2-GPU Cards in vSGA-mode.

This works perfectly and the performance is very good.

Now we in the progress to upgrade to Inventor 2016 - but with Inventor 2016 the performance is absolutely bad - even with very small files (as an example only a simple cube).

The VMs are sized okay (8 vCPUs, 16GB RAM) and 3D is activated in vSphere. I've recognized, that the "Software graphics" Checkbox is always checked on. If I untick it and restart Inventor, its checked again.

Only one time I managed to turn on the Hardware acceleration (unchecked "Software graphics"-box) and it worked fine.

How is it possible, that Inventor always falls back to software graphics?

Best regards,

marius

[blair]

In Virtual Machines, the graphics hardware can be emulated. Depending on how this is emulated nd which version of Direct 3D they are using may cause newer versions on Inventor to fall back to software rather than performance or quality.

I use Parallels 12 on my laptop and it only runs at Direct X9. 

[DannyHubbard]

Marius,

As long as the Nvidia driver is installed on your hypervisor and the VM machines Inventor should detect the driver and run in Performance Mode. Which driver do you have installed? What vGPU profile are you using on the VM machines?

Thanks,

Danny

[Anonymous]

Hello Danny,

thanks for your reply.

The Nvidia driver is installed on the hypervisor and working correctly:

~ # nvidia-smi
Tue Aug 30 07:14:37 2016
+------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 346.69     Driver Version: 346.69         |
|-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name        Persistence-M| Bus-Id        Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp  Perf  Pwr:Usage/Cap|         Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|===============================+======================+======================|
|   0  GRID K2             Off  | 0000:86:00.0     Off |                  Off |
| N/A   34C    P8    18W / 117W |    263MiB /  4095MiB |      0%      Default |
+-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
|   1  GRID K2             Off  | 0000:87:00.0     Off |                  Off |
| N/A   29C    P8    17W / 117W |    773MiB /  4095MiB |      1%      Default |
+-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+

What exactly do you mean with "vGPU profile"? We have ESXi 5.5 and Horizon 6 so I only add a virtual graphic card and tick the checkbox for "3D-Renderer" and Hardware-Acceleration from the drop down menue. I think those profiles are only on ESXi 6.0 with shared vGPU?

Edit: Here two screenshots, unfortunately only in german as it is a german system:

Best regards,

Marius

[DannyHubbard]

Marius,

When you setup your Golden or Master VM image you should edit the hardware settings to add a Share PCI device like:

This is where you would set your vGPU profile, you also need to make sure in the VM image/snapshot you have the Nvidia driver also installed.

If I recall correctly when setting up the VM snapshot for use with a vGPU you need to install the Horizon View Agent, Horizon Direct Connection then the Nvidia Driver to get things to work correctly.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/grid-vgpu-deployment-guide.html

Thanks,

Danny

[Anonymous]

Hi Danny,

the mentioned shared PCI is not in ESXi 5.5 what we are using.

It is a virtual graphics card with 3D hardware acceleration.

In short ESXi 5.5 does not support vGPU

Since we are using Inventor 2014 very successful with the vSGA - or Virtual Shared Graphics  technology, we thozght, Inventor 2016 shouldnt be a problem. With Inventor 2014 it was no problem to untick the "Software graphics" checkbox and it worked absolutely flawless. I can see that on the hypervisor with nvidia-smi. It then has about 20-25% gpu usage.

When I start Inventor 2016 the checkbox is always unticked, the performance is very poor and the gpu is only used at a maximum of 10% because Inventor 2016 always falls back to software graphics which is then powered by the cpu.

Is there no way to force hardware graphics?

Inventor 2016 does not even gives me an error message when it switches back to software graphics.

Best regards and thaks for your help again,

Marius

[DannyHubbard]

Marius,

Sorry for the delay but I wanted to double check, with Inventor 2016 you cannot force hardware acceleration on in this instance.

Thanks,

Danny

[Anonymous]

Hi Danny,

thanks even when this are sad news for us. So no chance to use Inventor 2016 with ESXi 5.5? It is unbelievable that Inventor 2014 works so good and 2016 not.

We try to work hard to upgrade ESXi to 6.

Best regards,

Marius