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Comment by zten | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, if you care about 3D acceleration on a Windows guest and aren't doing pcie passthrough, then KVM sure isn't going to do it. There is a driver in the works, but it's not there yet.

edit: I made a mistake and got confused in my head with qemu and the lack of paravirtualized support. (It does have a PV 3D linux driver, though)

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KVM will happily work with real virtual GPU support from every vendor; it's the vendors (except for intel) that feel the need to artificially limit who is allowed to use these features.

I was mostly hoping qemu would get paravirtualized support some day, because it is leagues ahead of VMware Player in speed. Everyone's hopes are riding on https://github.com/virtio-win/kvm-guest-drivers-windows/pull....

I guess my comments make it sound like I don't appreciate this type of work; I absolutely do. An old friend of mine[1] was responsible for the first 3d support in the vmware svga driver, so this is a space I have been following for literally decades at this point.

I just think it should be the objective of vendors to offer actual GPU virtualization first and to support paravirtualization as an optimization in the cases where it is useful or superior and the tradeoffs are acceptable.

[1] https://scanlime.org/

There has been a driver "in the works" for the past decade. Never coming. MS/Apple do not make it easy anyway.

Do any of the commercial hypervisors do that today?

Pretty much all of them do, though the platform support varies by hypervisor/guest OS. Paravirtualized (aka non-passthrough) 3D acceleration has been implemented for well over a decade.

However NVIDIA limits it to datacenter GPUs. And you might need an additional license, not sure about that. In their view it's a product for Citrix and other virtual desktops, not something a normal consumer needs.

Yes and no; you can use GPU partitioning in Hyper-V with consumer cards and Windows 10/11 client on both sides, it’s just annoying to set up, and even then there’s hoops to jump through to get decent performance.

If you don’t need vendor-specific features/drivers, then VMware Workstation (even with Hyper-V enabled) supports proper guest 3D acceleration with some light GPU virtualization, up to DX11 IIRC. It doesn’t see the host’s NVIDIA/AMD/Intel card and doesn’t use that vendor’s drivers, so there’s no datacenter SKU restrictions. (But you are limited to pure DX11 & OpenGL usage, no CUDA etc.)

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