Many companies look to desktop virtualization as a means to improve security and maintainability of their IT infrastructure. Historically, however, virtualization did not lend itself well to graphically intensive applications. Fortunately, technologies such as NVIDIA vGPU, formerly known as NVIDIA GRID, have overcome this limitation. NVIDIA vGPU software creates virtual GPUs that offer full support for virtualization and can be efficiently shared by multiple VMs. Such a setup provides an experience that is very close to working on a physical desktop machine, with the VMs able to use the proper NVIDIA OpenGL drivers.

Luciad portfolio products are verified to work on NVIDIA vGPU systems with the following virtualization solutions:

Support for OpenCL is only available if the VM uses "GPU passthrough" mode. OpenCL is currently used in LuciadLightspeed for Line-Of-Sight calculations and image processing.

On other virtualization platforms, Lightspeed views may not be able to use the native driver for the underlying GPU directly. This usually results in degraded performance and/or loss of functionality. We recommend using the software-based GXY view in this case.