Userful™: Session (GPU) Acceleration

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(Updated 2021.02.09)

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Introduction

With Userful 8.7 version, Userful™ introduced Session (GPU) Acceleration feature for dynamic content. This feature allows the administrators to take advantage of the Intel® (onboard) GPU and the Nvidia GPU for rendering dynamic content (including Web Browser, CMSs and Desktop sessions) over video wall. This results in optimized performance as the pixel rendering is controlled and handled by the GPU.

Requirements

Video Wall Zone Settings

To enable this feature, following requirements must be met:

• Use the supported CPU/GPU chipset

• Create and configure the video wall and select the "GPU" (onboard or Nvidia) from the drop-down (as shown in the image to the right). Visit Zone Settings for more details.

Note: Only one video wall can have this feature enabled for each GPU. If you enable a second video wall with this feature, the first video wall will no longer access the GPU.

• The video wall should be mapped to the supported source (Web Browser, or CMS, or Desktop sessions).

Verification

Nvidia GPU

Once the video wall is configured, assign the video wall to the supported source and use the nvidia-smi command to check the GPU usage.

• Open terminal and type in the following command:

 $ nvidia-smi 

The output looks like:

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 367.35                 Driver Version: 367.35                    |
|-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name        Persistence-M| Bus-Id        Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp  Perf  Pwr:Usage/Cap|         Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|===============================+======================+======================|
|   0  GeForce GTX 980 Ti  Off  | 0000:01:00.0     Off |                  N/A |
|  0%   52C    P8    21W / 275W |    192MiB /  6077MiB |     12%      Default |
+-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes:                                                       GPU Memory |
|  GPU       PID  Type  Process name                               Usage      |
|=============================================================================|
|    0      5325    C   userful-videowalld                             190MiB |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+

You should find the GPU-Util value to be non-zero reflecting the actual GPU utilization/performance.

Intel® GPU

For video wall accelerated using Intel® (onboard) GPU:

• Open terminal and type in the following command to install the command package:

$ sudo intel-gpu-tools 

• Once completed, type in the following command:

$ intel_gpu_top

The output looks like:

                  render busy:  50%:  █████████              render space: 2/4096
               bitstream busy:   7%:  █                      bitstream space: 3/4096
                 blitter busy:   0%:                         blitter space: 0/4096

You should find the render busy value to be non-zero. The field “render busy” reflects the actual GPU utilization/performance.

Please Note: DO NOT Leave the intel_gpu_top program running for more than a few minutes. Leaving it active while running a video wall can affect overall stability.

Related Links

• Control Center
• Zone Settings
• Configuring Video Wall