Excalibur Tech Preview provides a preview of several enhancements to Desktop Agent XenDesktop designed to provide a user experience with Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 virtual desktops. 
HDX technologies are important for the delivery of the new generation of Windows desktop and Windows 8 style applications because the DirectX graphics technology has become the new standard. Excalibur offers a choice of software-based (CPU) rendering or hardware (GPU) rendering of Windows 8 desktops and DirectX 3D applications. (And do not worry, OpenGL apps advantages, too.) Rendering hardware maximizes server scalability by offloading the CPU, but at the cost of more expensive server speed.
Windows 8 is particularly well suited to mobile devices. So much work goes into the Windows Activation Support multi-touch for future versions of Citrix Receiver for iOS and Android. Our engineers have also managed to get a computer desk and very fluid application experience on mobile networks, even when bandwidth is limited. As discussed in detail in my blog on Adaptive Display, the HDX SuperCodec has been improved in Excalibur with H.264 Compression-Deep XenDesktop HDX 3D Pro, which dynamically adjusts to changing network conditions.
GPU also come into play as an option for H.264 encoding. Today GPUs are not limited to graphics rendering; they are high-performance processing engines. As with the graphics rendering using the GPU for compression offloads the CPU of the server to obtain a higher user density. Modern GPUs such as NVIDIA Quadro and VGX offer new series of real-time processing power to encode video stream.
Using a Windows device to access your Windows virtual desktop continues to provide special benefits. With Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012, the Office of the composition is performed by the Desktop Window Manager, an application based on DirectX previously known to deliver the Aero theme in Windows 7. With Excalibur, we took the Aero Redirection function and XenDesktop 5.5 expanded office Composition Redirection. All you need is a 9 or better DirectX graphics processor on the user's Windows device. HDX interrogates the Windows device the user to verify that he required GPU capabilities and automatically returns to the server-side desktop composition if it does not. We can redirect the Office client devices capable composition regardless of whether the Aero translucency effect is on (Win7) or off (Win8 / Win7), sending the DirectX graphics commands to the user device for local rendering. Coupled with improvements in the efficiency of bandwidth that we have made in Excalibur, the result of this unique HDX technology is such a level of responsiveness and interactivity that you think your Windows desktop 8 is being performance in the cloud. HDX feel like local.
Derek Thorslund
Director of product management, HDX
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