Microsoft AVD – Multimedia Workload without a GPU

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Overview

Recently a customer’s AVD environment is in the stage on migrating the Workload from a Standard E16ads v5 to the latest Standard E16ads v6 series. Sounds like there’s no big difference, isn’t it? IT IS!
During the first tests with the v6 Desktop, we stumbled across a nice positive side effect…

v6 series is using AMD EPYC™ ’s fourth generation of 9004 processors with a boosted maximum frequency of 3.7 GHz. With that high amount of CPU performance, it’s possible to use H.264 streams, decoded by CPU – which is normally the Job for a GPU.

In other words – playing Videofiles / Youtube / Vimeo is working very fluent, compared to the v5 series session hosts. Yes, there is a CPU spike, but not that high other Users were unable to work. But let’s see some test-results

INFO: I’m using the Regkey to higher up the frame rate from a default of 30 to a maximum of 60 fps.

Testing

The biggest difference was with the multimedia-platform vimeo.com. It looks like they are supporting a very high software-decoding (CPU) H.264 rate, so the CPU is able to do all the work, a GPU would do in a common scenario.
The following Tests were made during a normal business day, so there were about 10 other user-sessions on that session host, working productive.
I had to downsize the Videos to 720p, so don’t be irritated about the Quality – in realtime it was 4k.

AVD Desktop-Session on E16ads v6, started from the latest Windows App version from macOS. Using MS-Edge inside the session to test the Video-Quality in Vimeo:

AVD Desktop-Session on E16ads v6, started from the latest Windows App version from macOS. Using MS-Edge inside the session to test the Video-Quality in YouTube:

AVD Desktop-Session on E16ads v5, started from the latest Windows App version from macOS. Using MS-Edge inside the session to test the Video-Quality in Vimeo:

AVD Desktop-Session on E16ads v5, started from the latest Windows App version from macOS. Using MS-Edge inside the session to test the Video-Quality in YouTube:

Summary

In both scenarios, the Videos are working fine, but the v5 had problems to reach 30fps and above with a higher amount of CPU usage. To conclude, is the v6 more expensive than v5? Yes sure, at a minimum. BUT as of the better performance of the CPU, there’s a higher user-density, so you could downsize your session hosts and giving your Users a better performance in general workload and for multimedia workload, too. It’s worth a try!