When one of our employees said to his friend the system administrator: “And now we have a new service - VDS with a video card,” he grinned in response: “What, are you going to push the office brethren to mining?”. Well, at least he wasn’t joking about games, and that’s fine. He understands a lot in the life of a developer! But in the depths of our souls, we have a thought that what if someone really thinks that a video card is the lot of miners and computer game lovers? In any case, it’s better to check it seven times, and at the same time tell why VDS with a video card was invented and why it is so important.
Of course, if you need a rented virtual VDS server with a video card for games, then don't even read further, go to and see the conditions / prices from RUVDS - you will surely like it. We invite the rest to the discussion: do you need VDS with a video card as a service, or is it easier to deploy your own software and hardware system?
The answer to this question depends on the business and the organization of its processes. In fact, such a proposal may be of interest to advertising agencies with their Photoshops and Corels, design agencies using 3D programs, design organizations with AutoCAD. Employees of these companies will be able to work from anywhere, therefore, it will be possible to hire people from anywhere and at the same time not spend money on capital investments in powerful equipment.
Now the resources of video cards are actively used by developers of popular software: any modern browser will render website pages much faster if it can use a graphics accelerator, not to mention the fact that for these same browsers there are 3D applications and games that work on WebGL.
Thus, it can be assumed that VDS with a video card will suit many IT companies, online stores, advertising and design agencies, companies related to data analysis, etc. Let's try to classify and describe in more detail the most relevant use cases.
The first thing that suggests itself is work with graphics. VDS with a video card will provide computing power for fast work with 3D graphics, animation, 2D graphics. For designers and gamedev companies, this configuration will be optimal, it will pull both modeling and Corel, Photoshop, Autocad, etc. Plus, as we discussed earlier, such a service has an important additional advantage: companies can easily form a distributed team without incurring huge costs.
Also, VDS with a video card may be of interest to companies that need to quickly calculate complex tasks, or a large number of discrete simple tasks. These are companies that collect and process data from a large number of sensors or IoT infrastructure, have billing, work with big data and need ultra-fast collection of metrics, etc. If you work with business applications based on Big Data, you will appreciate the speed of data analysis and processing. The computational advantages of VDS with video cards in solving the above tasks are due to the fact that the video card is served by productive RAM and has more arithmetic logic units than the CPU, which means that many more operations are performed simultaneously.
The third and first most important area of application for a VDS configuration with a video card is information security tasks such as monitoring and controlling traffic in busy networks, creating test benches for running pentest testing cases.
Also, such a server will help companies or private developers who train neural networks - the area where power is not superfluous.
Finally, a VDS with a video card is what you need for streaming, that is, streaming for broadcasting events, music and video content. The option is suitable for broadcasting from public cameras, may be of interest to conference organizers, etc.
Another scenario that was suggested to us by developers using VDS with a video card in real combat - this configuration works well for running an android emulator when developing mobile applications (and especially games).
Of particular tasks, we would single out two main ones, which are a set of frequent computational operations. The first is mining (does anyone do it?). The second is more interesting and less loaded. This is work with trading systems such as QUIK. Working with this configuration is comfortable for high-frequency trading.
Well, the last, most banal, task that is solved by VDS with a video card. It does not matter if you are a private or corporate client, no matter what software you use: accounting, modeling or drawing. Fast rendering of the interface will always be important to you, especially when using many RDP connections.
The test is
Of course, these tests will have nothing to do with your real tasks, business processes and implementation ideas, so treat them as examples.
For testing, we compared a virtual server with 2 processor cores and 4 GB of RAM with a 128 MB virtual video card and no video card. On both virtual machines, the same WebGL was launched in the Internet Explorer browser . 32×32 squares were drawn on the page at 60 frames per second.
We received such a picture on a virtual server with an installed video card. The drawing speed was 59-62 frames per second, all the space was filled, the number of sprites was 14 thousand pieces.
Clickable:
Result on a similar VPS without a video card. The rendering speed is 32 frames per second, with a fully loaded 100% processor, we have 1302 sprites, and an empty area.
Clickable:
We also tested our graphics card with the FurMark benchmark at 1920 x 1440 resolution and got an average of 45 fps.
Clickable:
Another video card stress test with MSI Kombustor, here we checked the video card for various artifacts. When testing, multi-colored spots, geometric shapes, stripes and other artifacts should not appear on the screen. After 25 minutes of testing the video card, everything is normal, no artifacts appeared.
Launched a video on youtube in 4k. Clickable:
We also ran tests in 3DMark. We got an average of about 40 frames per second.
using the Geekbench 5 benchmark for OpenCL
The test results pleased us. Try, test, share your experience.
By the way, has someone already tried the VDS configuration with a video card, why did they use it, how do you like it?
Source: habr.com