The performance of Citrix Receiver 12.8 for Mac has improved nearly 5x over Citrix Receiver 12.7 for Mac and it is on par with Citrix Receiver 4.9 for Windows, especially with HDX 3D Pro XenDesktop environment running graphics intensive workloads. The new threading architecture and fine tuning of the Thinwire stack results in great CPU optimizations translating to an awesome HDX 3D pro experience

In Citrix Receiver for Mac 12.5, we had optimized the H264 graphics pipeline by supporting hardware-accelerated Video Toolbox H264 decoder and OpenGL renderer. For more information, click here.

Citrix Receiver 12.8 for Mac can easily absorb graphics-intensive workloads, such as CAD applications, high-end games, rendering billions of triangles per second using Direct X. This resulted in near-native experience and high client side FPS when using HDX 3D Pro environment equipped with vGPU. Also, appropriate HDX 3D Pro policies need to be set on DDC. Improvements can be observed across Citrix XenApp and XenDesktop sessions irrespective of whether it is an HDX 3D Pro session or not.

This achievement is attributed to the changes in threading architecture and fine-tuning of the Thinwire graphics pipeline for heavy graphics workloads, especially for HDX 3D Pro and CPU usage optimization.

We took client-side average FPS as the benchmark in Citrix Receiver 12.8 for Mac and compared this to Citrix Receiver12.7 for Mac. Tests were run on a MacBook Pro (Intel i7 processor, 16GB RAM, and Intel Iris Pro built-in graphics) in the Citrix XenDesktop environment 7.15 (HDX 3D Pro VDA running Windows 10 on NVIDIA GRID vGPU.)

On DDC, the following policies were enabled.

  • Use Video Codec for Compression policy set to For the entire Screen.
  • Visual Quality policy set to Medium.
  • Target Frame Rate policy set to 60.

Benchmark tests were performed to validate performance improvements and the following table lists the results:

Benchmark tests FPS Improvement on Receiver 12.8 for Mac over Receiver 12.7 for Mac
UNIGINE Valley benchmark 400% – 600%
WebGL Aquarium 500% – 600%

Comparision between Citrix Receiver 12.7 for Mac and Citrix Receiver 12.8 for Mac

Comparision between Citrix Receiver 4.9 for Windows and Citrix Receiver 12.8 for Mac. It must be noted that the two systems are different in form factor, resolution and refresh rate and therefore the resultant video displays look quite different in the video.