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Practical use would be rather niche. For instance easy splitting resources of single GPU between multiple VMs if you want to run isolated instances of ML software. Or if you're need to run automated tests for your game across different OS. Or tests for any software that use GPU acceleration.

In reality most users of VFIO passthrough use it for gaming or creating multiseat systems. I guess it's will be true for vGPU feature too.

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There are also some benefits in load balancing GPUs. For instance processes can be controlled with controlled groups (cgroups) and niceness/thread affinity to make sure scheduling / resource allocation is done equitably between processes on the system. Using GVM and 'app VMs' it is possible to do similar things with the GPU (restrict GPU processes to a user configurable slice of the GPU so it cannot deny service to other processes on the system which are also using the GPU):

https://openmdev.io/index.php/Mdev-GPU#fbLen

Since this type of load balancing was originally used in the datacenter where virtual machine multi-tenancy was the use case the Quality of Service (QoS) functions here are fairly robust.

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