Nvidia is giving people in the UK a chance to test drive its GRID platform

Nvidia is giving you an opportunity to test drive its cloud-based GRID platform, a technology that provides remote access to GPU-intensive applications, for 24 hours. The graphics giant reckons that’s all you’ll need to get a flavor of its high performance virtual desktop experience, which runs off Nvidia GRID GPUs, hypervisors and virtual machines hosted in its own data centres. Nvidia says that having access to a high-powered GPU is essential for a smooth experience when accessing 3D engineering and design applications – such as Autodesk, Solidworks, PTC and Teamcenter – through a browser over the internet. Similar solutions can typically take up to four weeks to setup and can cost up to $35,000 (around £21,000/AUS$37,000), it claims. Nvidia Grid Test Dive isn’t a commercially available product that you can buy, but is instead being used in products by its partners. They include Citrix XenApp (for application virtualisation), Microsoft RemoteFX and VMware Horizon View (for GPU sharing or software virtualisation), Citrix XenServer and XenDesktop and VMware vSphere (for GPU pass-through) and Citrix XenServer and XenDesktop (for GRID vGPU or hardware virtualisation). The trial provides access to a virtual machine featuring 8CPU processing cores, 15GB of RAM and a dedicated Nvidia GRID GPU.