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The Woo
Asked: 2012-05-08 15:41:41 +0800 CST

RemoteFX On NVIDIA Lower Cost Video Cards

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I am looking into a Windows Server 2008 SP1 with RemoteFX enabled, however I do not want to buy one of the NVIDIA Quadro $1000+ video cards to do it (as only a small number of users will be using virtual machines). I would like to use one of the Geforce cards (I was looking at the 560 Ti or the 570).

I have heard that there are people that have modified the INF driver files for the Geforce cards to get them to work with RemoteFX, but I can't find any information on this. I would like to see some proof before heading out to buy one of the cards to test.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

remote-desktop graphics-processing-unit

4 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Well, I can't show you any proof but I can speak from experience in modifying the INF, of course, your results may vary.

    Whenever you modify the INF file for the NVIDIA drivers, you have to download the international drivers. So start by downloading the international drivers for the Quadro/Tesla (I downloaded version 296.70).

    Extract the installer using your tool of choice. Now, you'll need to know the device ID of the card you're planning to use (eg. 1082.01 for the 560 Ti), device ID's can be extracted from the drivers originally designed for your card (ie. the GeForce drivers). The sections you need to change in the INF are the "Devices" list and the "Strings", there's two different sets of devices in the Quadro drivers, so you might need to experiment but I am guessing the 560Ti would fit under SetA. So you'd modify the INF like so:

    [NVIDIA_SetA_Devices.NTamd64.6.0]
%NVIDIA_DEV.1082.01% = Section008, PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_1082

[NVIDIA_SetA_Devices.NTamd64.6.1]
%NVIDIA_DEV.1082.01% = Section018, PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_1082

[Strings]
NVIDIA_DEV.1082.01 = "NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti"

    Once you've done that, you should be able to save the INF file and run setup.exe from the directory you extracted the installer to.

    • 4

  2. The GeForce drivers can be added and installed using pnputil.exe make sure to use the -i argument for installation and -a for adding to the driver library.

    You can also use the wildcard to install all of the drivers thus making multiple displays also available in HV sever core.
    (pnputil -i -a c:\NVidia\*.inf) to use the GeForce drivers in remoteFX you will need to make them available in Hyper-v settings before adding them to a VM.

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  3. Wait for WIndows Server 8 - coming in October. RemoteFX is significantly better there, including support for no graphics card (virtual remote fx card).

    Forget Nvidia - to my knowledge ATI works fine ;)

    http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/w7itproSP/thread/79d5258f-a069-451a-a558-75b39a707fdf

    • -1

  4. Have you read the documentation?

    1. SLAT-enabled processor The processor in the RemoteFX server must support Second-Level Address Translation (SLAT). In virtualization scenarios, hardware-based SLAT support improves performance. On Intel processors, this is called Extended Page Tables (EPT), and on AMD processors, it is called Nested Page Tables (NPT).
    2. GPU At least one graphics processing unit (GPU) is required on the RemoteFX server. The GPU driver must support DirectX 9.0c and DirectX 10.0. If more than one GPU is installed in the RemoteFX server, the GPUs must be identical. The GPU must have sufficient dedicated video memory that is separate from system memory.
    3. Hyper-V The Hyper-V hardware requirements must be supported on the server. The Hyper-V hardware requirements for Windows Server 2008 R2 are available in the Windows Server 2008 R2 Technical Library

    And an official Beta SP1 list of drivers:

    We recommend the following drivers available from our partners: Nvidia drivers version 195.62 and 196.21, and ATI driver versions 8.720 and 8.723. We continue to work closely with all our partners to ensure that customers can reliably access drivers for their RemoteFX solutions, including through our participation in the next Logo kit. link

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