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Comment by TwoNineA | Hacker News Reader

I refuse to buy Nvidia cards until they stop blocking drivers in VMs with passed through video cards. Yes I know, you can bypass the dreaded code 43, it's more on principle.

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Interesting, never heard of this until now. A KVM maintainer seems to confirm this behavior too [1], albeit 3 years ago. Some newer anecdotes are around but it isn't clear if this is still happening [2][3]. (I used to virtualize the GPU via RemoteFx in Hyper-V many years ago and didn't run into this then. But now I'll have to give it another shot!)

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/2twq7q/nvidia_appare...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/VFIO/comments/5sh41p/any_other_reas...

[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/HyperV/comments/5u2ge2/nvidia_consu...

It's definitely still happening, however there are workarounds that bypass the driver's checks by changing hypervisor settings. One particularly insidious "feature" is that on the Quadro series of cards, which are ostensibly meant for this use case, it will disable some features if a VM is detected (in my usage, the displayport 1.2 support for 4k@60hz was not enabled until I enabled the workarounds)

The workarounds you mentioned didn't work at all for me (and reportedly for some other people too), on my GTX 680 or 1050m. Just a warning for those who may be considering buying a nVidia card and were given hope by exrook's comment...

I can add another anecdote in favor of this happening.

Tried it ~6 months ago with an old GTX 680 (had to update the video bios to get it to pass through to the VM, then got code 43), and about 1 year ago on a laptop with a GTX 1050m (detected by the VM, but code 43).

Had I known ahead of time that this would happen, I would not have bought the 680 or this laptop.

Do ATI cards allow pass thru?

Yes.

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