Workspaces are Blurry (WSP)

Question

I'm having an issue with a few users in our environment that use the WSP protocol. The PCoIP protocol was giving us some audio issues (choppy, etc) so we migrated them to WSP which fixed the audio issues but now have complaints about slow pixel rendering.

For example, when moving the mouse, or scrolling on a webpage, the text is blurry for a brief second or two. This is somewhat expected due to the nature of data transmission but it's bad enough where it can hurt your eyes over the course of the day. I currently ping about ~30ms to US-EAST-1 and do not have these issues. The users in question ping about ~60ms and have noticeable issues.

We've tried Hardware Acceleration as well as High DP mode but that didn't seem to make a difference.

I remember reading somewhere that you can manually set the Workspace settings by going to either some .ini or .json config file on the Workspace itself for PCoIP machines in the following locations:
C:\Program Files\Amazon
C:\ProgramData\Amazon

Do these config files also exist for WSP Workspaces?

Any other suggestions?

Answer

Hello! Over the past few years, we have made improvements on how the text is rendered using the WSP protocol. At this time of writing, the latest WSP agent version is 2.0.0.829. The major change to improve text rendering was released with version 2.0.0.312. Previous releases (such as all 1.x versions, like 1.0.1.1855) could experience the issue described above.

To check the current installed version, you can open the file ".applications" (there's a period) which is located in the C:\Program Files\Amazon\SkyLight\ (double click and choose to open with Notepad) in your WorkSpace and then look for the following:

```
{
        "appName":  "WspInstallStatus",
        "version":  "2.0.0.829"
},
```

If you still notice the issue with current versions, please check your latency by clicking the "honeycomb" icon in the top right of the WorkSpaces client. For optimal results, your latency should be less than 250 ms [1]. If you are not experiencing high latency, please open a new support case and we will be here to assist you.

[1] Amazon WorkSpaces client network requirements - https://docs.aws.amazon.com/workspaces/latest/adminguide/workspaces-network-requirements.html

Answer

WSP updates to improve frame rates are regularly being released, however I would like to revisit the audio issues at 60 ms with PCoIP. Typically, customers start to notice audio issues above 100 ms, so I think there is more to the story.

Workspaces are Blurry (WSP)

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