imagine a world where if you wanted to occasionally run small business errands
in your car manufacturers could force you to buy their workg grade Vehicles
you'd be pretty pissed off right well
that's essentially what NVIDIA did GeForce users who wanted to pass their
gpus through to a virtual machine were suddenly greeted with the infamous code
43 error when they tried to install drivers and they've had to spend the
last 7 years dealing with janky
workarounds until to today NVIDIA seems
to have finally decided that it is time to make amends so let's learn a bit more
and see if maybe just maybe NVIDIA is
turning over a new
Leaf code 43 has been a huge deal in
certain circles for a long time in no small part because of how ridiculous it
is because there's no Tech techncal reason why like most PCI Express devices
a GeForce card can't function just fine when passed through to a virtual machine
like in our two Gamers one CPU project and there's definitely no reason why a
Quadro which uses the exact same silicon
and often the same board layout would do it any better and yet if the GeForce
driver detected that it was running in a virtual environment it would effectively
say to you what lenus tals famously said to NVIDIA so NVIDIA
you to understand why any of this matters though we need to go back to the
beginning virtualization has been common on desktop computers since as far back
as the 9s when connectic virtual PC allowed Mac users to use Windows on
their power PC based machines now back then everything had to be emulated so
performance kind of sucked but as technology improved and especially as
Hardware assisted virtualization support became common more and more of the host
machines res resources became available with very little overhead to a guest
operating system on a virtual machine or VM that includes the ability to assign a
device entirely to the guest using a feature called pass through major
players like VMware and Microsoft with hyperv have supported these features
since very early on and while Hardware support for past through began in 2007
with AMD's K10 family of CPUs in 2008 with Intel's wolfdale chipset and bio
support from motherboard manufacturers was sporadic on both sides and it wasn't
until AMD's 900 Series chipsets in 2012 and Intel's has well refresh in 2014
that consumer Hardware started really handling it well AMD branded this
feature AMD VII and Intel went with vtd
but the technolog is more commonly called input output memory management
unit ormu and it is incredibly important for
virtual machines not only does IU allow pretty much any pce C device to be
passed through to a VM it can be used to sandbox faulty or even malicious
Hardware without worrying about compromising the rest of the system this
makes it useful not only from a functionality standpoint but also for
security oh and performance too while
devices like network adapters and drive controllers could be emulated passing
through a dedicated card could save that emulation overhead and allow a virtual
machine to have IO performance that was nearly on car with a bare metal one Over
time however this last Point has become less and less relevant thanks to the
broad adoption of paravirtualization the ability for very fast virtual devices to
communicate directly with the host without the need to emulate or pass a
full device through one network card for example can service multiple VMS with
very little overhead however one somewhat important piece of Hardware
still has no viable par virtualization
support the GPU and one group that heavily
relied on GPU pass through back then was the Linux Community it let them daily
drive Linux and game in a virtual Windows environment with like bare metal
performance perfect that is until
NVIDIA's 337 point88 driver release in
May 2014 Just days before Intel announced the pass through friendly
Haswell refresh this was one of NVIDIA's first
major middle finger to the Linux community and it wouldn't be the last
but get subscribed because NVIDIA's been doing a lot of things lately to try to
make up for it and we've got some videos planned to talk about them the question
though is why did they do this because whenever a newbie inevitably stumbled
across code 43 their outrage was Swift
and it was consistent because not only did it just hand a win to AMD who
decided not to lock down radon it was just totally ridiculous I mean it's not
like passing a GPU through to a VM unlock some super secret performance
enhancement that would directly eat into NVIDIA's Quadro sales but apparently
they thought differently or at least thought the collateral damage was low
enough not to matter LTT Store.com by
the way now at the time that bet probably looked pretty good because back
when this policy was enacted ryzen was but a twinkle in Lisa Sue's eye and AMD
was staring down bankruptcy quad core was as high as it went on the desktop
and it would stay that way till 2017 so From NVIDIA's perspective realistically
what gamer was going to sacrifice precious cores for this kind of use case
when they had so few anyone passing through must be a professional user but
then everything changed the overwhelming majority of new systems these days now
have six cores or more and there are a growing number of people looking to
legitimately take advantage of all that extra horsepower that goes woefully
underutilized in even the most multi-threaded games takes someone like
our camera guy David he wants his unraid NZ to give him high-speed storage for
personal video projects act as a Plex Media Server and serve as a capture PC
for his streaming rig with NVIDIA and bank doing the encoding using pass
through of course or take someone like Anthony who has somehow managed to game
on Linux every day at home since proton came out and yet still runs into games
that straight up run only on Windows but
hold on a minute lonus you might say those are projects that you guys did
before this change so what's the difference okay there were workarounds
to code 43 some of them were even pretty simple but NVIDIA's meddling caused no
end of headaches for novices who were just as likely to abandon the idea
entirely as to find a solution which sucks because it opens up a lot of
possibilities and the hardware is freaking capable of it now though it's
as simple as passing through your GPU and installing the driver as normal just
like you would do on a D so let's say you're a Linux user like Anthony you can
split your CPU and RAM up and then use an AMD GPU for its Superior Linux
experience while using an NVIDIA GPU for an my opinion still Superior Windows
gaming experience completely hack free got Xbox game pass and want to play
Microsoft Store games you can do that want to play epic game store or EA
Origin exclusives you can do that too want realtime Ray tracing and dlss go
for it and this is really really cool with Looking Glass you don't even need
to change the inputs on your display although it should be noted that at high
resolutions and refresh rates you can run into PCI Express bottlenecks for our
part though our ryzen 5000 series running PCI Express Gen 4 managed
1440p 144 Herz despite only running eight Lanes to each of our gpus if
you're okay Switching inputs to play your Windows exclusives though you don't need to worry about any of that because
it's all Native there are some drawbacks to this approach however while you do
get the full capabilities of the GPU including features like Shadow play and
NVIDIA broadcast you might still run into problems with anti-che software
engines like battle eye and easy anti-che are able to detect when a user
is running in a virtual machine and the situation with cheating using virtual
machines has unfortunately become bad enough that they've begun kicking
players who are running them as a preventative measure this is because
anti-che running inside a VM has no idea
what the host operating system is doing doing and that host OS just happens to
be able to manipulate the virtual machine's memory in ways that are
undetectable by anti-che hence the ban on VMS they do say that users running in
a VM won't be banned outright but there are reports of exactly that happening so
just be careful if you decide to try playing fortnite or Rainbow Six Siege
are there ways around these limitations probably but I'll leave that
up to you to research on your own for now the bottom line is that NVIDIA is
making changes to how they handle Linux and virtualization and many people
myself included could not be happier about it I don't agree with everything
they do but damn it you got to give credit where credit is due just like I
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looking for something a bit more data heavy maybe check out our recent video
on NVIDIA's resizable bar implementation that video is all about them benchmarks
because I'm all about them benchmarks without the benchmarks