Is SR-IOV The Future Of PC Gaming? | Level One Techs

Level1Techs
22

Just skimmed the video…

If only you and I met up @wendell. I live in Vancouver. You could see my passthrough setup with working Looking Glass for Twitch streaming… *sigh*

23

@SgtAwesomesauce A casual perusal of eBay shows GRID GPUs starting in the $300 - $400 range. Not chump change, but achievable for a dedicated enthusiast.

For example: https://www.ebay.com/itm/Nvidia-GRID-K520-8GB-Cloud-GPU/292623079201?

EDIT: And if you prefer Team Red: https://www.ebay.com/p/AMD-FirePro-S9100-PCIe-Server-Graphics-Card-100-505925/20013763851

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As far as I know, without SV-IOV, you can have multiple VMs using the same GPU, but only one VM can run at a time.

SR-IOV only helps if you want to run all VMs in the same time.

But then why would you run more then one VM with a dedicated GPU at a time ?

Can you play 2 video games in the same time ?

Unless you want to keep the other VMs on stand by, so you don’t have to wait until they boot, but then you’ll need a lot of RAM.

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My use case would not be 2 VMs, but one host and one VM.

Additionally, I’d probably want one OSX VM and one Windows VM.

That said, enterprise use case is so they can buy a more powerful GPU, run multiple VMs and get a higher density of computing.

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26

An even cheaper find, but I’m not sure if this card does SR-IOV. I think it’s designed for HPC, but there might be a way to persuade it to work with VMs.

Actually I’m curious about this one. Does anyone know if a Tesla GPU can be used for VM graphics acceleration?

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But what if you also have integrated graphics, and you use that for the host.

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What if that’s not powerful enough?

I also don’t have any more desktop systems with integrated graphics…

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Would probably be better off using that in its own VM.

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Passing through an iGPU is actually a fair bit more difficult.

It’s doable, but if your time is worth even minimum wage, it’s cheaper to buy a 1050ti to pass through instead.

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31

Hmm. Didnt know that.

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If you only do all graphics demanding tasks on the VM (like video games), then it doesn’t matter.

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Has to do with initialization, IOMMU groups and the way onboard components communicate over the PCIe fabric.

That’s a bit of a narrow use case.

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