Before we get into the fine details, let's start with a brief background of the high-end graphic features in Horizon View.

The support for high-end graphics has been released in phases, with the first phase supporting 3D graphics, which shipped with vSphere 5 and View 5.0, using a software-based rendering solution. This allowed support for Windows Aero, for example, but was still not up for some of the real high-end use cases such as CAD applications.

If we had been having this conversation previously, and you had a use case that required high-end graphics capabilities, virtual desktops at that time would not have been a viable solution. As we just discussed, in a VDI environment, graphics would be delivered using software. We are also using the graphics card on the server, which typically has limited capabilities, as all it needs to do is show a local console.

In the next phase, a hardware-based GPU solution was released with vSphere 5.1, allowing...