How do I get the best performance out of an A-Series Nvidia Card : SAFR Helpdesk

How do I get the best performance out of an A-Series Nvidia Card Print

Modified on: Thu, 23 Mar, 2023 at 3:23 PM

Windows Drivers for the NVidia A-series cards (A10, A40, etc) and the older generation Tesla T4 cards do not include WDDM drivers which enable decode. This results in higher than desired CPU utilization which has negative impact TCO.

To perform decode on the T4 or A-Series Nvidia cards, the NVidia Virtual GPU licenses should be used. NVidia Virtual GPU licenses can be run on either Virtual Machines or bare metal hardware (a regular PC).

There are 4 types of licenses for NVidia Virtual GPU or VGPU. The license needed for SAFR is Virtual Workstation (RTXVWX). With the license comes the VGPU driver which can be installed in Windows to allow applications like SAFR to leverage the cards decoder, thus offloading this work from the GPU to the GPU and increasing the system's capacity.

Following cards can benefit from using Nvidia VGPU:

Tesla T4
Nvidia A2, A10, A16, A40, etc.

Perpetual license is $950 per 4 GPUs ($450 lic + $500 for 5 yr min of support). Or $250/yr per 4 GPUs. So a machine with 4x T4 will be $1800 * 4 + 1000.

You can apply for an evaluation license of Nvidia VGPU here: https://www.nvidia.com/en-in/data-center/resources/vgpu-evaluation/

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How do I get the best performance out of an A-Series Nvidia Card Print

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