14 DAY TRIAL // Together with AMD, Nvidia has also announced that its Quadro professional line of graphics cards supports Microsoft's RemoteFX technology, which is included in the first official service pack for the Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 SP1 operating systems, enabling thin clients and other such systems to run graphics intensive tasks on a remote machine.
These applications are run on a server inside a virtual machine and then transmitted remotely to end-users while keeping the data secure in the data center.
Thanks to the hardware-assisted graphics acceleration enclosed in the RemoteFX technology, users get a full-fidelity virtual desktop experience.
This looks nearly identical to a Windows 7 local desktop, as the technology supports 3D applications and portable graphics content such as Microsoft Silverlight and Windows Aero.
To enable this technology in their drives, Nvidia has been working with Microsoft since the first beta, and now offers support for RemoteFX in the Quadro 4000, 5000 and 6000 professional graphics cards, as well as in the M2070Q server graphics module.
“Leading server OEMs, including Dell, HP, and IBM are all supporting Microsoft RemoteFX capable platforms with Nvidia Quadro technology,” wrote Will Wade, a senior product manager responsible for virtualization and remoting technologies at Nvidia on the company's official blog.
“Together, we’re offering companies enterprise-class software and hardware reliability combined with Nvidia GPU performance.
“This combination provides employees a much better user experience that can help increase their productivity,” concluded the company's rep.
To get a sense of how powerful this technology actually is, during the 2010 edition of the Tech Ed Europe conference, Microsoft has demoed it with an HP thin client, which was running the computer game Crysis from a remote server.
The Quadro WHQL qualified drivers for Server 2008 R2 SP1 are available on Nvidia's website. Future driver updates will increase the number of clients supported per GPU.