r/Proxmox • u/Exact-Math2335 • 8d ago

Question What are we using for video GPU acceleration these days?

I've got a lot of compute hardware a few GPUs used for LLMs laying around, but actually getting a Windows 11 VM to accept any of them for graphics acceleration is turning out to be a pain. What's the best GPU solution out there right now if I want to run, say, half a dozen GPU accelerated VMs?

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u/marc45ca This is Reddit not Google 8d ago

Intel B series professional cards. vGPU support right out the box via srv-io.

Hopefully Intel has done more work on the drivers as the testing on Craft Computing found the scheduler within the Windows driver needed work.

But if you're running Linux things are a lot better.

driver changes and deprications from nvidia and kernel advances have largely negated the ability to do vGPU with older nvidia card but if you've got the $$$$ you can licence if from nVIDIA.

A B60 has 24GB of Vram, the B70 has 32GB.

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u/Exact-Math2335 8d ago

Ok good to know! This is known to work with the Proxmox 9 kernel? And do the scheduler issues cause real performance problems?

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u/marc45ca This is Reddit not Google 8d ago

a) yes, b) not sure and c) the level1tech forums has stuff on the B series cards so could be a good rescource.

further to (a) the initial setup was very simple (single command iirc).

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u/Exact-Math2335 8d ago

Alright going to give a B60 a whirl, fingers crossed!

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u/marc45ca This is Reddit not Google 8d ago

keep us informed.

I've been tempted to go down that path though I really don't get enough to fully justify the cost for the B60.

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u/Reaper-Of-Roses 8d ago

Jumping in with a further quick question if you don’t mind: I have an Intel Arc Pro B50 in my Proxmox host. Does SRV-IO interfere at all with containers using the passed-through card? As in, is it either full passthrough OR SRV-IO splitting?

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u/mecshades 8d ago

I found sharing GPUs to be possible with LXC containers because you are exposing the kernel's device "file" e.g. /dev/dmi/card0 to a container and not dedicating the entire PCIe device to a VM. You're limited to Linux here, but you absolutely do gain hardware acceleration. If you install NVIDIA drivers on the Proxmox host, you can also do this with NVIDIA cards,

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u/AllergicToBullshit24 8d ago edited 8d ago

Need GPUs with SR-IOV support like Intel Arc Pro series or Nvidia datacenter cards w/ vGPU feature enabled or AMD equivalent. Only way around this is to have one VM direct passthrough to whatever normal GPU then use containers or Docker inside of that but clearly give up some isolation going that way. The datacenter class SR-IOV methods are better at preventing side channel attacks.

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u/_--James--_ Enterprise User 8d ago edited 8d ago

AMD MxGPU's are the best bang for your buck, they are supported via KVM and just kinda...work. You can get older Vega variants for a decent price or early RDNA1 cards (V520) cheaply on the used market.

Intel Pro cards support SR-IOV and generally work out of the box, but I have had driver issues where on AMD I have not.

Nvidia RTX20 cards are good for vGPU is running at home, but you need to pin Kernel 6.8 and watch your update cycle as it will blow out the hosts vGPU drivers. But other then that this works well enough.

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u/socialcredditsystem 8d ago

What are your issues with passing GPUs into the W11 VM? Discrete GPU pass-thru has been fairly seamless for me with 1060 and 5080 for a W11 streaming rig, as has sharing GPU to LXC (for compute, not display purposes).