Nvidia GRID – Square resolution screen

Just a short post regarding Nvidia GRID but this may be handy for some of you. Recently, a customer called me explaining virtual machines (VM’s) did not scale correctly and had a square screen. In fact, the horizon client scaled the display in an 800*600 resolution which is the fallback resolution of a windows display driver. This behavior of windows typically indicates that you have an issue with a video driver.

The image above illustrates the exact result which the user experienced.

In our case, I did know from a previous project that the ESXi hosts had NVIDIA GRID cards installed. When I checked the VM’s settings following could be seen:

Nvidia GRID - wrong VM configuration Something I noticed was that the customer was using the M10-8A profile. So the VM is using the Virtual Applications Settings (vApps).

This means that the following limitations are in place; The vGPU profile will still use 8gb of Frame Buffer but has only 1 virtual display head available.

This head is also hard-limited to a 1024*1280 resolution.

 

So to fix this, the vGPU profile had to be adjusted to the B or Q profile, This will increase the maximum resolution per head. Plus also the amount of available virtual display heads that can be used.

An important thing to mention is that the B profile is only available with the GRID vPC and vDWS license. And whereas the Q profile is only available with a vDWS license.

After implementing a M10-8Q profile as the vGPU profile, we logged into the VDI, and the resolution was indeed full screen.

Nvidia GRID - fix resolution

So to close this post, choosing the right licensing model when using NVIDIA GRID is essential. As choosing a lower profile has a direct impact on the user experience. More info on NVIDIA Licensing can be found here

Want more troubleshooting tips? check our other blog.

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