[Solved] Intel UHD 630 integrated GPU & adding a new NVIDIA GPU passthrough performance

[zognic]

Hi there,

 

I need your advice about VM and GPU passthrough

Today I have only one Intel UHD 630 integrated GPU provided by the intel Core i5 9600K. It's my primary card and I use it also for HW acceleration into PLEX

  append initrd=/bzroot i915.alpha_support=1

It works like a charm but today I want to do more with my Unraid by creating a dedicated VM for Gaming.

By Gaming VM I mean, I would like to GameStream my games (with moonlight) in order to be able to play them on my Nvidia Shield or other devices

 

Today I created a VM on vdisk  & I passthrough my Intel GPU on it, it works, but the performance are really bad (not smooth at all). And one constraint is when the VM is running, Plex docker lost the HW acceleration (I guess it's normal)

1 - First question, is it normal that GPU performance are really bad? (maybe because I'm sharing the same card for unraid & VM?)

 

Now I plan to buy a Nvidia GPU card and dedicated it to the VM.

2 - Question, can I expect a lot of performance improvement  by dedicating a GPU card to the VM?

3 - Should I think about passthrough other HW to gain perfs? Like a dedicated NIC?

 

For other VM improvement , I followed recommendation from SpaceinvaderOne.

Unfortunately I didn't succeed to install the VM on my unassigned NVME drive (WD black), I will create a dedicated post later on it.

atm VM is running on vdisk (ssd) 

 

Also if someone have a good experience with VM / Moonlight (Dolphin Streaming) and who can share his best practice, I will be grateful

 

Thanks in advance for your recommendations

 

Julien

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited June 19, 2020 by zognic
Solved

[testdasi]

1. Yes. iGPU is only good enough for some games and that's bare-metal. Adding VM overhead and most games would be unplayable. What games are you playing?

2. It depends on the dedicated GPU. A GT710, of course not. A RTX 2080 Ti, of course yes (by a massive lot). And everything in between.

3. For gaming, unlikely. The graphic card is almost always the bottleneck.

[zognic]

Thanks testdasi for your answers

 

Mainly Emulators (Dolphins/PSPPP)

I was thinking about a GTX 1650 / 1660 Super

but best wish is to be able to play in 1080p with high settings (around 50 fps could be ok)  Red Dead Redemption 2 & Assassin Creed Odyssey would be the big deal.

 

But My really first interrogation is more on the performance when I'm browsing the VM, it's not really smooth and I don't know if it's related to the Graphic Card.

 

[T0a]

On 5/9/2020 at 4:18 PM, zognic said:

Thanks testdasi for your answers

 

But My really first interrogation is more on the performance when I'm browsing the VM, it's not really smooth and I don't know if it's related to the Graphic Card.

 

 

* Do you access your VM from another device via VNC?

* Have you tried a wired connection?

* Have you tested other remote accessing software such as nomachine, splashtop or parsec?

* Do you have the same bad experience when you plug in a monitor directly to your MB port and use an attached keyboard and mouse?

* Does Windows recognize your UHD 630 in the device manager with correct drivers loaded?

* Have you tried to download the latest UHD 630 drivers from Intels Website? They usually perform better than the one shipped with Windows.

[zognic]

I changed since my configuration

 

Unraid boot on Intel UHD Graphic card  and I PassThrough my new Geforce GTX 1650 super on my Gaming VM.

 

Now my PLex can HW Transcode with Intel GPU like a charm and I can play recent games (Full HD Ultra) on my all devices with the winning combination of GeForce Exp & Moonlight or Parsec. With the help of some tweek I can say that my VM is now really close to baremetal.

 

 

 

 

[IMTheNachoMan]

On 5/9/2020 at 9:47 AM, zognic said:

  append initrd=/bzroot i915.alpha_support=1

 

 

Why do you have this? Where did you see to add this? I have the same graphics and I don't see anywhere that I need to use that?