What kind of graphics card are Windows Azure Virtual Machines equipped with?

Question

I am thinking about running some graphics intensive programs on Windows Azure virtual machine, but not sure what kind of hardware do they have. Does all the VM have the same GPU? What is your experience of it?

Answer 1

The GPUs in Azure Virtual Machine are likely to be very basic and will most probably not have anywhere near the processing power you will need for carrying out intensive graphics manipulation. To my knowledge MS don't publish the details of the graphics hardware behind their Virtual Machines (If they actually use them at all?).

There's a question here on running WPF in an Azure cloud service which may be helpful.

Can Azure run WPF?

Answer 2

The N series Azure VMs support beefy GPUs. The NC series VM sports Tesla K80, with DDA (discreet device assignment) it supposed to provide close to bare metal performance. NV series VMs offer Tesla M60 with nVidia GRID.

More:

• https://www.hpcwire.com/2015/09/29/microsoft-puts-gpu-boosters-on-azure-cloud/
• https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/hybridcloudbp/2016/12/13/n-series-azure-vms-with-gpu/

It's fascinating that there are FPGAs in Azure machines too (although not publicly accessible): https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-catapult/