tldr: reproducible "Guest has not initialised the display (yet)" bug somehow corrupting VNC in VMs also breaks passthrough and is an absolute nightmare when troubleshooting VM passthrough.
So I've spent the last 2 days trying to get reliable Windows 10 and 11 GPU passthrough with incredibly frustrating results. After painstakingly following all over the information online (thanks spaceinvaderone!) I reached my wits end with an attempt at Windows 11, cut my losses and set up a windows 10 VM, which worked perfectly, passed through GPU etc with no issue.
Today, I proved it all still works, and upgraded to a 5950x due to the success of that test, redid my bios settings and after hours and hours, no luck getting the passthrough to work. In frustration, I re-enabled VNC to see if I could prove the VM still worked, and it failed throwing a "Guest has not initialised the display (yet)" error in VNC, apparently a common bug when re-enabling VNC after attempting GPU passthrough.
Attempting to fix that problem, I recreated that VM using the original vdisk, an idea I got from the linked post, which worked. I then passed through the GPU etc, and it immediately worked. To prove the point, I restored BIOS to default, changed the bare minimum to enable VFIO, and the windows 10 VM still worked with passthrough.
Then, I recreated the windows 11 VM (note, I only got this to work for 1 boot after a full day of troubleshooting), pointing to the original win11 vdisk, and that also immediately worked. This means that I've wasted minimum 10 hours across 2 days of troubleshooting, due to not understanding that the VM will sometimes get broken by the VNC vs GPU passthrough and need recreation via this method. I see a lot of people reporting frustration getting GPU passthrough to work, and this may be a significant contributor.
*edit attached text comparison of xml for someone who is better at interrogating them.
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