When running virtual machines on Windows, you can now use GeForce GPU Passthrough if you have an Nvidia GPU.
Although the feature has been around for a while, the company didn’t publicly support it until now, with the announcement that GeForce GPU Passthrough for Windows Virtual Machine is now available in beta.
When running a virtual machine on Windows, GeForce desktop graphics cards based on the Kepler, Maxwell, or Pascal architectures or newer would be able to take advantage of GPU passthrough. On the other hand, users who want to use GPU passthrough on a laptop would need a GPU that is based on the Maxwell architecture or newer.
Developers can use virtual machines to test applications and even games on various operating systems by only using one machine thanks to GPU passthrough. Linux users, on the other hand, would be able to use a virtual machine with a GPU passthrough to play Windows-based games.
GPU Passthrough (GeForce)
To use GeForce GPU Passthrough on your machine, make sure you have the R465 driver enabled.
Although GPU passthrough can seem like a godsend for developers who want to test code on a single machine in both Windows and Linux, there are some drawbacks.
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Nvidia’s GeForce GPU Passthrough technology, for example, only allows one virtual machine to access the host machine’s GPU at a time. The company’s GeForce graphics cards will not suffice if you need to run multiple virtual machines on a single GPU. You’ll need to upgrade to a Tesla or Quadro graphics card instead.
Now that Nvidia has confirmed that GPU passthrough is supported, we may expect to see more updates and features that take advantage of the technology in the future.
