AutoCad on Azure Virtual Desktop NV48s_v3 - Flickering

[DougDavey]

We are currently testing AutoCad on Azure Virtual Desktop and have put in place the NV48s_v3 with 48 cores, 448GB memory and 4x GPUs. We wanted to give the testing the greatest chance possible.

Everything appears to work as we want it to apart from 1 thing, which at this stage is going to cause the end users to abandon this idea.

On this server we are using AutoCad in full desktop mode as that seems to work the best, we are not using published apps.We have the 3 required GPOs configured to allow the proper use of the graphics card.The users have described what to them looks like “flickering” in AutoCad.

I have investigated this and what they are describing as flickering is the rapid lowering and raising of quality when moving the mouse around. When moving the mouse it causes parts of the screen/drawing to slightly lower in quality, when the mouse is kept still the quality is raised again.
This is specifically related to this GPO: “Prioritize H.264/AVC 444 Graphics mode for Remote Desktop connections”

What I imagine it is doing is lowering the quality of parts of the screen that are not currently being focused on to improve responsiveness for the parts that are. It is particularly noticeable on large fonts with bright colours.
However, for the users this is very annoying as it does it so rapidly that every time they move the mouse, the whole drawing they are working on seems to flicker.
I have tested this in MS Paint as well and the behaviour is the same, so it is an RDP setting not specific to AutoCad.

If I disable this GPO: “Prioritize H.264/AVC 444 Graphics mode for Remote Desktop connections” Then the flickering disappears, but the performance of Autocad is noticeably worse when panning around the whole drawing or zooming in and out. I am assuming because it is now rendering the whole image at full quality rather than lowering the quality when moving the image.

Has anyone else experienced this while using AutoCad on AVD?
Can anyone offer any advise to combat this issue while maintaining good performance?

Thanks,
Doug

[#2]

@DougDavey Try this: Panning and cursor performance issues in AutoCAD products while working remotely | AutoCAD | Autodes...

[#3]

Reviewed that article already thanks. Adjusting the cursor does not affect it. Turning off hardware acceleration defeats the purpose of having such a high powered graphics AVD server.

[#4]

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-desktop/remotefx-graphics-performance-counters

[#5]

To be clear. This is not a performance issue.
The issue is present with 1 user on a 48 core server on a 1gbps internet connection.
This is an issue that only occurs when using a specific GPO setting and relates to the rapid raising and lowering of quality creating a flickering effect.
The actual performance of the application is fine.

[#6]

@DougDavey 

Our users are reporting the exact same issue.

We are using the NC8as_T4_v3 machines and see the flickering effect.

This is with AutoCAD LT 2022, but also with IntelliCAD.

For now we are disabling Hardware Acceleration in AutoCAD as per recommended here for Citrix environments:

https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/autocad/learn-explore/caas/sfdcarticles/sfdcarticles/AutoCAD-...

I cannot say that it lowers the performance that much and I also see utilization of the Video Encode on the GPU in Task Manager inside the Azure Virtual Desktop Host.

If we disable the GPO "Prioritize H.264/AVC 444 Graphics mode for Remote Desktop connections" we see a drop in performance and the Video Encode in Task Manager does not do any work any longer.

Did you make any improvements on the situation?