Gaming customers across the world tend to look for the same critical components when choosing their playing environment: Performance, Affordability, and Timely Content. And for gaming in the cloud, there’s a fourth: Reliability.

With these clear guidelines in mind, we are excited to announce the public preview of our new NGads V620-series virtual machines (VMs). This VM series has GPU, CPU, and memory resources balanced to generate and stream high-quality graphics for a performant, interactive gaming experience hosted on Microsoft Azure. The new NGads instances give online gaming providers the power and stability that they need, at an affordable price.   

The NGads V620-series are GPU-enabled virtual machines powered by AMD Radeon PRO V620 GPU and AMD EPYC 7763 CPUs. The AMD Radeon PRO V620 GPUs have a maximum frame buffer of 32GB which can be divided up to 4 ways through hardware partitioning, or by providing multiple users with access to shared, session-based operating systems such as Windows Server 2022 or Windows 11 EMS. ¹ The AMD EPYC CPUs have a base clock speed of 2.45 GHz and a boost speed of 3.5 GHz. VMs are assigned full cores instead of threads, enabling full access to AMD’s powerful Zen 3 cores.

NGads instances come in four sizes, allowing customers to right-size their gaming environments for the performance and cost that best fits their business needs.

The two smallest instances rely on industry-standard SR-IOV technology to partition the GPUs into one-fourth and one-half instances, enabling customers to run workloads with no interference or security concerns between users sharing the same physical graphics card.

The VMs also feature the AMD Software Cloud Edition, which targets the same optimizations available in the consumer gaming version of the Adrenaline driver but is further tested and optimized for the cloud environment.

The NGads V620-series VMs will support a new AMD Cloud Software driver that comes in two editions: A Gaming driver with regular updates to support the latest titles, as well as a Professional driver for accelerated Virtual Desktop environments, with Radeon PRO optimizations to support high-end workstation applications.

Microsoft Azure, do more with less

Deployment in Azure enables gaming and desktop providers to take advantage of the infrastructure investments put in place by Microsoft in data centers across the world. This gives our customers the ability to only pay for what they use. They can depend on an infrastructure framework that is constantly kept up to date with highly reliable uptime. Customers can innovate faster to differentiate their offerings and provide customers with a richer experience. As our customers’ business needs expand, they can benefit from the economies of scale available from Azure. In addition, customers can build a more complete and robust solution through integration with the broad range of cloud services for storage, networking, and application management available as part of the Azure offerings.

Flexible workloads, flexible costs

High-performance GPU-accelerated workloads have always ranged from workstation design apps to VDI and simulation rendering. Each of these has the potential to tax even powerful graphics boards. Gaming workloads bring the additional challenges of requiring very fast graphics remoting—the interactive transfer of graphics and user controls over the internet. Further, there is a wide variety of games, connection types, and resolutions available to the user.

The NGads V620-series helps resolve these challenges by providing support for a range of visualization applications so that gaming or desktop service providers can optimize for precisely the experiences expected by the end users. Service provider customers can choose the right-sized VM that will best serve their needs without over-allocating resources. As the needs of their offering change, the common software support across VMs allows service providers to shift to a VM size with either a higher or lower GPU partition, or to shift capacity to other regions of the world as their business footprint expands.

Performance powered by AMD GPU and CPU

The NGads V620-series combines AMD Radeon™ GPU and Epyc™ CPU technology to provide a powerful and well-balanced environment for hosting rich and highly-interactive cloud services. 

The AMD Radeon PRO V620 GPU is based on AMD’s RDNA™ 2 Architecture, AMD Software, and AMD Graphics Virtualization technology. 

Each AMD Radeon PRO V620 GPU is equipped with 32MB of GDDR6 dedicated memory, a 256-bit memory interface with up to 512GB/s bandwidth, and ECC support for data correction.  To enhance the user experience, they are designed with hardware raytracing using 72 Ray Accelerators, 4608 Stream Processors, and a peak Engine Clock of 2200 MHz.

The AMD software supports the DirectX® 12.0, OpenGL®4.6, OpenCL™ 2.2, and Vulkan® 1.1 APIs for broad compatibility with gaming and graphics applications.  This enables the NG series VMs to support a very broad range of workloads from cloud gaming, GPU-enhanced VDI, and GPU-intensive Workstation-as-a-Service solutions.

The NGads V620-series uses GPU Partitioning to virtualize the GPU and provide partitions from the full 32 GB memory size (1x GPU), 16GB (one-half GPU), or 8GB (one-fourth GPU).  The Azure GPU Partitioning is based on the PCIe standard SR-IOV extension, which provides a highly predictable and secure method to host multiple independent user environments on the same hardware GPU board.

The AMD EPYC 7763 CPU is built on the 7nm process technology, featuring AMD Zen 3 cores, Infinity Architecture, and the AMD Infinity Guard suite of security features. The AMD EPYC CPUs have a base clock speed of 2.45GHz and a boost clock speed of 3.5 GHz to allow the user to take advantage of a single powerful core when required by the application.

Learn more about NGads V620-series

Customers can sign up for the NGads V620-series preview today. NGads V620-series VMs are initially available in the East US2, Europe West, and West US3 Azure regions.

Footnotes

EPYC-018: Max boost for AMD EPYC processors is the maximum frequency achievable by any single core on the processor under normal operating conditions for server systems

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