Thursday, April 1st 2021
NVIDIA Enables GPU Passthrough for Virtual Machines on Consumer-Grade GeForce GPUs
Editor's note: This is not a part of April Fools.
NVIDIA has separated professional users and regular gamers with the company's graphics card offering. There is a GeForce lineup of GPUs, which represents a gaming-oriented version and its main task is to simply play games, display graphics, and run some basic CUDA accelerated software. However, what would happen if you were to start experimenting with your GPU? For example, if you are running Linux, and you want to spin a virtual machine with Windows on it for gaming, you could just use your integrated GPU as the GeForce card doesn't allow for virtual GPU passthrough. For these purposes, NVIDIA has its professional graphics card lineup like Quadro and Tesla.
However, this specific feature is about to arrive in even the GeForce lineup offerings. NVIDIA has announced that the company is finally bringing the basic virtual machine passthrough functions to the gaming GPUs. While the feature is representing a step in the right direction, it is still limited. For example, the GeForce GPU passthrough supports only one virtual machine and SR-IOV feature is still not supported on GeForce. "If you want to enable multiple virtual machines to have direct access to a single GPU or want the GPU to be able to assign virtual functions to multiple virtual machines, you will need to use NVIDIA Tesla, Quadro, or RTX enterprise GPUs.", says the NVIDIA FAQ. GeForce virtualization, which is now still in beta, is supported on R465 or higher drivers.
The full content from NVIDIA's website is written below.
Source:
NVIDIA
NVIDIA has separated professional users and regular gamers with the company's graphics card offering. There is a GeForce lineup of GPUs, which represents a gaming-oriented version and its main task is to simply play games, display graphics, and run some basic CUDA accelerated software. However, what would happen if you were to start experimenting with your GPU? For example, if you are running Linux, and you want to spin a virtual machine with Windows on it for gaming, you could just use your integrated GPU as the GeForce card doesn't allow for virtual GPU passthrough. For these purposes, NVIDIA has its professional graphics card lineup like Quadro and Tesla.
However, this specific feature is about to arrive in even the GeForce lineup offerings. NVIDIA has announced that the company is finally bringing the basic virtual machine passthrough functions to the gaming GPUs. While the feature is representing a step in the right direction, it is still limited. For example, the GeForce GPU passthrough supports only one virtual machine and SR-IOV feature is still not supported on GeForce. "If you want to enable multiple virtual machines to have direct access to a single GPU or want the GPU to be able to assign virtual functions to multiple virtual machines, you will need to use NVIDIA Tesla, Quadro, or RTX enterprise GPUs.", says the NVIDIA FAQ. GeForce virtualization, which is now still in beta, is supported on R465 or higher drivers.
NVIDIANVIDIA has enabled GPU passthrough beta support for a Windows virtual machine on GeForce GPUs. What does this mean?
With virtualization enabled, GeForce customers on a Linux host PC can now enable GeForce GPU passthrough on a virtual Windows guest OS. There are a few GeForce use cases where this functionality is beneficial such as:What class of virtualization is supported on GeForce GPUs?
- GeForce customers wanting to run a Linux host and be able to launch a Windows virtual machine (VM) to play games
- Game developers wanting to test code in both Windows and Linux on one machine
GeForce GPU passthrough supports 1 virtual machine. SR-IOV is not supported on GeForce. If you want to enable multiple virtual machines to have direct access to a single GPU or want the GPU to be able to assign virtual functions to multiple virtual machines, you will need to use NVIDIA Tesla, Quadro, or RTX enterprise GPUs.
Which driver is GeForce virtualization (beta) supported on?
GeForce virtualization (beta) is supported on R465 or higher drivers.
Which GeForce GPUs and Windows OSes support virtualization?
The feature is enabled on all GeForce/TITAN GPUs supported in the R465 driver (Kepler and later for Desktop; Maxwell and later for Notebook) for Windows 10.
Do you need to have more than one GPU installed or can you leverage the same GPU being used by the host OS for virtualization?
One GPU is required for the Linux host OS and one GPU is required for the Windows virtual machine.
18 Comments on NVIDIA Enables GPU Passthrough for Virtual Machines on Consumer-Grade GeForce GPUs
Nope
But at least its officially supported now rather than the previous work arounds.
If your using VMWare in Windows, it won't be hardware accelerated - direct to the GPU still?
edited
Pass-through on VDI, move along people nothing to see here.
Date: 1 April.
I'm not sure what this accomplishes. Things like proxmox andmaybe? vmware, already allow GPU passthough of consumer cards.