Rx 6800 xt gpu passthrough on esxi 7

Hello,

I would like to apologize in case such topic has been already discussed, but I couldn’t find it

Lately I got asrock rx 6800 xt pdg and wanted to test the gpu passthrough. For this purpose I installed esxi 7 and set a win 10 machine. First thing that I noticed in the ESXi was that for some reason the GPU was not recognized correctly (most likely because of lack of drivers)

Regardless I was able to install the Adrenalin 2020 driver pack and the card was recognized as a second one. Decided to use Steam Remote play with World of warcraft, but I got quite some lag and poor performance, while connected on 1GB local network

What I am trying to understand is, what might be the bottleneck for this performance, maybe I am missing some additional configuration on the Hypervisor or VM?

Either Steam Remote Play isn’t using the GPU for the transcoding or the game is using the virtual GPU from VMware. You should deactivate it in order for your 6800XT to be the primary one

You are going to have to passthough gpu. Manage->Hardware. Then add select the gpu in device list. If that is your only gpu you will list the output from esxi. I will note that Nvidia gpu would better for passthough in virtualization. AMD cards do general do not reset correct. Which means that if gpu crashes you will need to restart the entire host to get the gpu to work ago. I have use plenty AMD gpu. You also would have issue the image does shutdown correctly. When I used AMD gpu I had script that would disable gpu before the image would shutdown. Then when the image starts up it would enable the gpu.
The other issue that can have with AMD cards with passthough is sound cutting out. It happens randomly.
For years I ran a RX480 and tested AMD 6900xt. The 6900xt had the same issue

Hello and thanks for the fast reply! I already added the gpu to the VM, but in Devices I can find both rx6800xt and the virtual gpu that VMWare provide by default to any Windows VM.

You can try disabling the device in Device Manager by right clicking on it and selecting Disable.

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Do you have screen connect to 6800xt or dummy screen device(sorry don’t know correct name. If you don’t it defaulting to virtual GPU from vmware. Also the screen would have to be primary.

Thank you for your suggestions, I disabled the device and also bought a dummy hdmi adapter, but unfortunately I am still getting poor performance. Also wanted to mention, if I set the “hdmi screen” as primary, I am getting black screen

Edit: probably not but will leave it as it’s useful info for this type of project

Could it be that you need to unlock the screen on the device itself? There is a powershell script that lets you do this.

@powershell -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy unrestricted -Command "$sessionid=((quser $env:USERNAME | select -Skip 1) -split '\s+')[2]; tscon $sessionid /dest:console" 2> UnlockErrors.log

taken from here

Thank you for your reply, currently I am accessing the VM through ESXi console