We've been told recently by VMWare that we cannot expect to see anything close to native desktop performance for Windows 7 VMs across more than two monitors. I was stunned to hear this, so I've been thinking of easy ways for the community at large to test this.
Here it is! For those fortunate enough to be running at least two monitors, try this:
1. Start up Excel (2010 or above), and manually expand the window across 2+ monitors.
2. Fill every visible cell and at least a few hundred more rows down with the formula "=RAND()". Remove the double quotes when pasting into Excel. This fills the sheet with a bunch of floating point numbers which I've found is by far the hardest kind of spreadsheet for PCoIP to scroll.
3. Try scrolling down and seeing if the scrolling is smooth.
For four 1920x1200 monitors, we can only ever achieve low single-digit frames per second and the screens are totally out-of-sync: one monitor will move down a row, then some other monitor, etc. The only real difference after installing an APEX 2800 offload card is that the screens are a bit more in sync.
Even with just three monitors the frame rate is grossly slow, in the 6-10 fps range. Only over two monitors do I achieve kinda/sorta smooth performance at around 18 fps.
This is the case regardless of whether we are using our V1200QP zero clients or a full-blown high-end desktop running the View client. All machines are cabled with gigabit Ethernet.
Anybody running at least three monitors get better results then we do?