GPU passthrough..

[GerLive]

Hello everyone!

I need your help on GPU passthrough, please advise on graphics cards that work fine without all the madness.
I'm running a server on Proxmox 8.4 with two Gold 5315Y CPUs.
The GPU is only needed for a single VM that serves as a terminal server.
Does anyone have any experience with AMD Radeon Pro W5700 or WX 3200?

Many thanks in advance!

 

[guruevi]

AMD is crap when it comes to passthrough or virtualization, their drivers do not work and there is no vGPU functionality whatsoever. I have 2 of the one you mention, they work in passthrough, but their performance is bad and AMD has nothing approaching CUDA or PyTorch, most professional software only supports NVIDIA.

The best option is an nVIDIA Tesla or Quadro with respective drivers (Grid+vGPU if you want to split the GPU to multiple VM). Given you seem to have a somewhat professional setup, that should be relatively painless. Proxmox and nVIDIA now officially support the professional line of products. You can do full passthrough if you don’t need to support multiple VM

 

[GerLive]

Thanks for the quick response. Even without licensing? Unfortunately, I couldn't manage it with an old quadro 410 and all instructions with blacklists and args without success always end with error 31.

 

[guruevi]

Passthrough doesn’t require licensing, but an old GPU like that may not support virtualization (it’s a PCIe 2.0 card) or even a modern Windows release, both driver and OS support for that card ended 2 years ago, so you need to find an equally old OS version and the old drivers. Based on the documentation I can skim, it does not have any virtualization support (it was introduced in 2012).

I was talking more RTX6000 or A40/L40 generations or even a T4 if you’re on a budget.

 

[GerLive]

I meant licensing from NVIDIA because I was really desperate with it. It's about WinServer 25, would there be anything on the market up to 500€ ?

 

[guruevi]

Yes, NVIDIA licensing is only for vGPU clients, passthrough or MIG doesn’t require it. Not sure what the licensing terms for Windows Server 2025 are. You can pick up a T4 for ~$150-200 from eBay, but that’s already older tech and will be EOL in just a few years (2027 support ends, typically another 2-3 years before the driver supports stops), an A2 is still within your budget if you get it used and still relatively new.

I don’t know if you have any nearby sources for server recyclers but Ampere series are being removed en masse right now (5y old) sometimes you can get lucky either asking nicely or dumpster diving datacenter trash before it goes to the recycler.