nVidia - To Disable or Not to Disable, that is the question

[John Twilley]

For those or you running nVidia GRID cards in you Horizon environment, I was wondering if you disabled the VGA or IDD display drivers.

I've always disabled my VGA display adapter, and then used the Horizon Direct agent to manage the master VM for updates. 

Do any of you leave it enabled?  Just curious how others manage their nVidia master images.

[StephenWagner7]

In the old days, you were supposed to disable the VMware SVGA 3D driver if you had an NVIDIA vGPU attached. Then, you were supposed to leave everything as default and let the drivers handle it.

Then the Horizon Indirect Display Driver was released, which furthered automated control of graphics in the background, and for the most part worked off default deployments without any issues.

Up until recently, I'd say just install everything, let it run default, and you're good to go, however I've identified a bug with vGPU 16.x and 17.x when used with Windows 11 23H2, where resolution control times out and/or fails on user logon with Instant clones:

Frozen screen with NVIDIA vGPU, Windows 11, and VMware Horizon - The Tech Journal (stephenwagner.com)

I found that disabling the "VMware SVGA" driver workaround this issue, and on persistent VMs improves logon experience and time.

Another workaround is to use the registry to force the IDD to be used, which will utilize the vGPU, however some applications see this, and fail to query the capabilities of the GPU as shown here:

GPU issues with the VMware Horizon Indirect Display Driver - The Tech Journal (stephenwagner.com)

 

As of right now, I'd say if you're using vGPU 16/17 with 23H2, disable the "VMware SVGA" adapter. Once this is fixed, I return to my stance of leaving everything to default unless explicitly requiring otherwise (for a bug, or special configuration needed for 3rd party applications).