GPU passthrough vSphere 3D acceleration

Question

I have a Nvidia Tesla T4 I passed through to a VM (Windows Server 2019) on vSphere ESXi 8.0. Windows is detecting the card and it's showing in device management, but any software that wants to use 3D rendering, is ignoring the passed through GPU.

My first thought was to go to Nvidia Control panel and just force the software to use the GPU. I noticed however that the 3D settings were missing from the control panel.

I started googling and found that you should disable 3D acceleration of the VMware video card. But the tab "Display" is not showing in either vSphere client nor in the ESXi host client settings. I figured the advanced parameter mks.enable3d should do the same thing. As documentation was scarce, I tried both TRUE and FALSE values without any luck.

I tried different Nvidia drivers, I tried disabling the build in VMware SVGA display adapter, tried all kinds of other advanced parameters but always had the same results.

I assume I'm just missing some option, somewhere to force the VM to use the GPU but I can't seem to find it. All walkthroughs online are just "enable passthrough, add the PCIe device to your VM, install the drivers and voilà, it's showing up in your device manager so it must be working"

If anyone knows or has dealt with the same issue, please let me know, I'm officially out of ideas, hence the post.

Thanks!

Answer 1

Not sure if this will help, but when two cards are presented, you can choose the default card to use via this window:

Which changes registry key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\DirectX\UserGpuPreferences\NVIDIACorp.NVIDIAControlPanel_* And sets value like this: GpuPreference=2;

And also some of the invisible in the panel settings (you panel lacks them in a way similar to mine) you may be able to change directly via registry.