ESXI 8.x passthrough issue to access to GPU hardware

[Juan Carlos Calvete]

Hi,
I'm using ESXI 8.0.2 (no vcenter) as a home lab. I configured a Windows 10 VM, connected to multiple pci boards, like my Old graphic card Nvidia Gforce 210 via passthrough. This way, I'm able to use the computer as a ESXI hipervisor, and also, make use of the VM like a regular computer, using a monitor, keyboards, mouse and USB sound card. Everything works quite fine, but I'm facing one "small" issue. When I try to use an app that needs hardware access to my Nvidia GPU, it doesn't work. In this case, I need OBS Stuidio to be able to render videos directly with the nvidia gpu, but I can ONLY see SOFTWARE rendering.


I think the only "exotic" config in my setup was setting hypervisor.cpuid.v0 = "False" in the .vmx file
Another thing to be aware of is that I disabled the vmware tools driver for the graphic card, as you can see in the picture. A read somewhere I needed to do this in order to make it work fine:

Also, I add an attachment with my .vmx config file, so that you can have a look and check if I need to change something. 
It's an old graphic card, but I think that hardware access should be available, as I'm using passthrough..
I'd be very pleased to get any kind of advices from you. Please, ask me any question you can have regarding my setup

Thanks in advance!!

[Juan Carlos Calvete]

Actually, it's a weird behaving, as I've realized that I can use the Nvidia driver options trough the nvidia control panel... So, I think that the driver is working. But... why I'm not being able to use the hardware acceleration in my apps, like OBS Studio?

[Lou Yovin]

At the risk of asking the obvious, did you install the proper NVIDIA drivers in the VM? I am doing similar with ancient K620 without any special settings in VM or host and it is working fine with GPU. 

[Juan Carlos Calvete]

Hi,

Yes, I installed latest drivers from Nvidia, and also I tried different versions, just in case... but it's always the same behaviour.

Thanks for your answer

Regards

[louyo]

Wonder if the application supports that card?  I have an older video card and the last update to the application I run refused to support it. I just stayed backlevel and all is OK. 

[ggathagan]

Another "At the risk of asking the obvious" question:

Have you established that OBS Studio works properly with that GPU on a physical computer running Windows 10?

I was also going to suggest trying it with Ubuntu as the OS, but there seems to be a fair number of additional packages that have to be installed in order for the Linux version to work.
Still, it might be worth the effort.

Another test would be to try it with a newer NVIDIA GPU to see if the problem persists.

[Juan Carlos Calvete]

Hi,
thanks for your answers

As far as I can remember, that graphic card worked fine with OBS in a normal computer
I also thought about passing through to another VM with linux, but even if that worked, the problem may be with the drivers, and I need it to work on windows 10

Regards!