In addition to the numerous enhancements detailed here, View 5.1 debuts a number of significant enhancements and optimizations to the PCoIP protocol. In this blog, we detail some of the most beneficial:
PCoIP efficiency
Continuing refinements to compression protocols and general performance optimization deliver further improvements in PCoIP efficiency and corresponding reductions in CPU consumption. While already performing better than the VDI competition (as illustrated here and here), these enhancements deliver up to an additional 1.3X reduction in PCoIP overheads.
Client optimizations
For this release, there has been significant optimization of the VMware View clients, making their protocol handling significantly more streamlined. This is especially apparent on thin-clients, where video playback performance is improved by as much as 3X over previous versions, as illustrated in the figure below. Indeed, even relatively low-performance processors can deliver excellent 720p video playback performance. These improvements are available for both x86 and ARM clients.
Network improvements
PCoIP handling of adverse network conditions has been significantly improved. This is especially beneficial for users connecting wirelessly from tablets or laptops over congested and lossy WiFi networks. These enhancements are most apparent during video playback and ensure fluid high-frame video playback — the improvement can be as high as 8X.
Interactivity improvements
Significant improvements have also been made to interactivity, making interaction with the remote desktop significantly more fluid, and continuing to further improve the experience associated with using a remote desktop. As a simple visual test of this improvement, the picture below show a user rapidly drawing a spiral in mspaint, when connecting to their remote desktop using both RDP7 and View 5.1. With RDP7, the resulting spiral is obviously formed from rough polygons, whereas, with View 5.1, the spiral is significantly smoother (while this test may seem an overly simple example, it is heavily influenced by the speed and frequency at which the client communicates with the remote desktop and clearly conveys the likely differences in scrolling and dragging performance – in a later blog we will deep-dive on interactive performance, using the user experience techniques we discuss here).