Performance analysis of vdesktop using PCoIP accelerator vs vSGA-based on VMware environment — A case study at UKRIDA University

Improving display performance of virtual desktops can be done in two ways, which is using protocol accelerator or graphic accelerator, both are hardware based approaches. The accelerator protocol is a hardware device capable of improving the PCoIP protocol for data transmission, while the graphics accelerator is a GPU. Our testing comparison environment using Teradici APEX 2800 LP for protocol accelerator, and NVIDIA GRID K2 for GPU. Both of the hardware at the first time looks different for the purpose, but in general, it has same function, offloading graphics processing from CPU. Our performance analysis is intended to compare both of the hardware that using different approaches. We're using PCMark 8 benchmark applications that run applications that the user usually requires for every day computing. Performance differences are measured through virtual desktop performance and average CPU usage load. Our test show that Teradici APEX is able to provide good performance to support the needs of users in general such as web browsing, office applications, video calls, and basic photo editing, but CPU usage for heavy graphics tasks can make the CPU burdened, so that it is necessary to use NVIDIA GRID GPUs in the use of high-graphics applications such as rendering and video encoding.