AMD FirePro V7900 & RemoteFX

I’ve been playing with my Dell Precision T7600 for a few months now. I’ve got it running Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 with Hyper-V enabled. The whole box is a dedicated VM host for my development environment. I’ve been trying to use RemoteFX to get advanced graphics running in Windows 7 & Windows 8, but not having much luck.

My first problem is that the Dell website doesn’t list Windows Server 2008 drivers at all. I’ve been using the Windows 7 drivers. They *seem* to work, but when problems start it’s always a worry.

My graphics card is an AMD FirePro V7900 and it’s not clear whether this supports RemoteFX or not. The AMD FirePro range appears to, but this specific card is not actually listed, although the unified driver does list it. Once I found these I swapped over to using them as they at least offer a Windows Server 2008 R2 version.

However, performance in a Windows 7 Ultimate guest seems poor. There’s a noticeable lag when scrolling in IE 9 or when switching between applications, and sometimes the screen doesn’t repaint at all. Occasionally the guest graphics driver fails completely, the screen freezes then refreshes and a little pop-up tells me that Windows recovered (presumably by just starting another copy of the driver). It’s so bad I gave up after a couple of days and removed the RemoteFX driver from the VM.

Windows 8 Enterprise won’t accept it at all. The driver (Microsoft RemoteFX Graphics Driver – WDDM) has “stopped working because it reported problems (code43)”.

An email to AMD customer support has not been especially useful. They claim that “the AMD GPU is not virtualized within the RemoteFX desktop. It is used to assist with compression and accelerating 3D calls”. This appears to be the opposite of what the AMD FirePro blurb says: “AMD FirePro professional graphics combined with Microsoft RemoteFX enables full GPU virtualisation”.

AMD also implied that things might be better under Windows Server 2012, but that they don’t have any supported drivers (that is, WHQL tested) as yet. So not really very useful there either. I asked them when they expected the drivers to be available and was told “our next driver release will most likely support Server 2012”. So no date then.

I must admit, I’m not really sure whether Windows 8 is supported by RemoteFX on Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 – maybe Windows Server 2012 is required for Windows 8 RemoteFX?