[winswitch] NVENC and xpra

[Antoine Martin]

On 12/12/13 04:29, ... wrote:
> Antoine,
>
> Great information.  Thank you!
>
> So, VirtualGL would theoretically work for multiple users per card
> (multiple applications on multiple displays)?
Yes.
> My intention is to be serving modern video games, like Minecraft, League of
> Legends, etc.  I guess I would have to look into if openGL acceleration is
> all that is needed.
OpenGL is enough for games on Linux.
The next problems you are likely to hit are:
* screen resizing: games usually resize the screen to a lower resolution
to be able to sustain a decent framerate.
At present xpra makes the Xvfb server match the client's resolution -
which is not what you want.
You want the whole display as a window. You could run Xephyr or Xnest as
an xpra child, and run the game from within that nested X11 server.
Worth a try.
Another way would be to modify xpra to add the ability to export the
whole display as a window - not sure it would make much difference.
* keyboard and mouse synchronization:
http://xpra.org/trac/ticket/137
" games rely on precise mouse movements and their timing"
Summary: network latency and mouse movements/acceleration are unlikely
to get on well...

Antoine

> I look forward to trying out the virtualGL with my simple setup, and
> working towards getting having a need for NVENC.
>
> -Elliot
>
>
>
>
> On Tue, Dec 10, 2013 at 10:33 PM, Antoine Martin <antoine at nagafix.co.uk>wrote:
>
>> On 11/12/13 06:18, ... wrote:
>>> Hello,
>>>
>>> I had some questions about NVENC.  Sorry if this information is somewhere
>>> already and I didn't find it.
>> I assume you've already read:
>> http://xpra.org/trac/wiki/Encodings/nvenc
>>> Can xpra use a kepler enabled nvidia card to both render graphics
>> (hardware
>>> accelerated) and h264 encode them before shipping them off to another
>>> display across the network?
>> According to Nvidia:
>>
>> https://developer.nvidia.com/sites/default/files/akamai/cuda/files/CUDADownloads/NVENC_AppNote.pdf
>> "NVIDIA's latest generation of GPUs based on the Kepler architecture,
>> contain a
>> hardware-based H.264 video encoder (henceforth referred to as NVENC). "
>> So, assuming that this is a pro card or that you found a license key
>> (...), yes you can use NVENC with such cards.
>> This answers the second half your question.
>>
>>
>> As for the "render graphics hardware accelerated", it is a little bit
>> more complicated. Based on your description, I assume that the card is
>> not connected to a monitor or that this monitor will not be used for
>> viewing. If that's not the case, the answers below are going to be
>> inadequate.
>>
>> First, you need to define "accelerated":
>> * if you mean OpenGL acceleration - which is often enough, then this
>> will do what you want and is supported:
>> http://www.virtualgl.org/
>> * if you want to use the regular "nvidia" X11 driver for acceleration
>> directly, there are ways to use a regular X11 server (usually running as
>> root) to replace xpra's Xvfb, you may need to use the "
>> ConnectedMonitor" option if no monitor is attached to the card. This
>> will only work for a single user per card and your mileage may vary: it
>> "should" work.
>> Using "xpra shadow" to copy an existing display is not a good solution
>> at present as it uses polling and will use far too much CPU time -
>> though that could be fixed.
>>
>> The main downside of the current xpra 0.11 code is that it is not really
>> tailored for this Nvidia specific use-case: during screen updates the
>> pixel data will be downloaded from the GPU to the CPU and then uploaded
>> again to the GPU for compression... which is a complete waste of
>> valuable memory bandwidth. It shouldn't be too hard to bypass this
>> unnecessary copying, and if there is enough demand for it then we can
>> certainly look at it.
>>> If not, is this something that some other VNC like program can do?
>> Not as far as I know: xpra is the first, and at present the only
>> open-source software to have NVENC support.
>>>   If so,
>>> are there any other hardware requirements or issues that I should know
>>> about?  Would any kepler/NVENC enabled nvidia card be able to do this?
>> As per above, with consumer cards (GeForce) you will need to find a
>> license key...
>>
>> I do wonder if some consumer protection law could force Nvidia to
>> provide the keys required to take advantage of the features they
>> advertised when the cards were sold (and earlier SDKs did not require
>> license keys either).
>> As can be seen here in the GTX680 whitepaper:
>>
>> http://www.geforce.com/Active/en_US/en_US/pdf/GeForce-GTX-680-Whitepaper-FINAL.pdf
>> "All Kepler GPUs also incorporate a new hardware-based H.264 video
>> encoder, NVENC.  "
>>> Does anyone have any experience with this?
>> Cheers
>> Antoine
>> _______________________________________________
>> shifter-users mailing list
>> shifter-users at lists.devloop.org.uk
>> http://lists.devloop.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/shifter-users
>>
> _______________________________________________
> shifter-users mailing list
> shifter-users at lists.devloop.org.uk
> http://lists.devloop.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/shifter-users