NVidia has caught up to AMD in support for Microsoft’s RemoteFX product.  If you haven’t heard of RemoteFX before, it’s best described as another version of VNC & VirtualGL.  In a corporate environment, you currently must deploy some type of GPU at each workstation, particularly if you want decent performance under Windows Vista or Windows 7, which can drive up costs significantly and cause a bit of an administrative headache from the power and cooling requirements which may cause systems to fail a bit faster than desired.  With RemoteFX, you can deploy thin clients that access remotely available GPU hardware.

That’s where NVIDIA and Microsoft RemoteFX come in. Enabled by server-discrete-GPUs, this solution will move the corporate user’s PC workload into the server room, and then IT managers will service those users’ PC requirements with anytime/ anywhere, secure access that is IT friendly. RemoteFX, combined with NVIDIA Quadro GPUs, will enable the full Windows 7 desktop experience including rich and 3D media for very low cost ‘thin’ clients from anywhere on a company’s network.

Not exactly new technology, Microsoft has had their Terminal Services product for a while and VirtualGL can do this today via VNC (for Free even), but it’s nice to see some major commercial entities acknowledging this use in something more than a hack.  Lo0ks like right now it’s only for Quadro products (Which makes sense, this is a somewhat high-end tool meant for professional use), but no information on what the differences will be between the AMD version and the NVidia version.  My guess is nothing, except the NVidia version will enable CUDA-type applications.

via The NVIDIA Blog – NVIDIA and Microsoft Enhancing the Virtual Desktop User Experience with Microsoft RemoteFX.

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