Monday, May 28, 2012

VGA Passthrough KVM Fedora 17 and Benchmarks

Check out Arch Forum, the method in this guide is beeing deprecated in favor of vfio, which at this point requires a bit more work but it might work better for you.


Well how do I start?
"Huston, the Eagle has landed"


I think this is the first time in the last 12 month since I "felt the urge" to do this, that I feel that I've done it, that VGA Passthrough is not only possible, but it also stable enough (99% of the time, although a reboot is sometime necessary) for daily use:
- USB passthrough is working fine
- the sound controller passthrough is also working fine
- VGA passthrough is alright and well I just played Crysis 1280x1024 all setting Ultra High without any problems.

Once you have the hardware, the knowledge is out there (and here), you just need to play with it and make it work for you.

Howto 

The latest version of the guide is at: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ef_nfl652L0HLn_wGvnpgjsBJd9LZzaV_-rIcEEoK8Y/edit


Benchmarks

Proper benchmarking is hard, and I might have done something wrong, because almost all the benchmarks are showing >90% of native Windows performance, except Crysis (I played it in the vm with all setting on ultra high and it was fine, at least in my humble opinion, so i don’t know why I got so low result in the benchmark ) and Stawker Call of Prypiat (this is a total mistery).

You can find the results at: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Aryg5nO-kBebdFdOLU1Yc0trT29JdUxac21QcXg3Qnc#gid=6

You can always do your own ;)

Q&A 
From the last post about VGA passthrough.

Anonim1
    Xen benchmarks, well I think I've had enough of using 'sombody's else code' for the time beeing, but I wouldn't exclude a Xen comparison sometime in the future, if I have the time.
Anonim2
    https://help.ubuntu.com/community/KVM/Installation this + intel_iommu=on to grub (grub2-update), and not installing ubuntu with uefi should be the same thing as fedora, I don't have the time to test ubuntu right now.
Evan Fraser
    Check how many cpus does the VM see? If you get the same bad performance no mather what video card you use, maybe the game is cpu bound that's where I would start.