Complete Esxi noob - video passthrough?

[Goooober]

I recently put together a fairly budget oriented system to run Xpenology as a little home NAS but before setting it up as that I decided to just play around with it and try learn some new things (Linux, VM's etc).  I decided to start with Esxi and setup a Windows 8 VM and an Xpenology VM and ideally I wanted to be able display the Windows VM on the television that the system will eventually be connected to.  I was told on another forum that to do that I need to passthrough a video card but it was not clear exactly what the hardware requirements are in order to do that.  The CPU is an Intel G3258 that supports VT-x but not VT-d and i'd like to know if VT-d is a requirement for video passthrough?  I also understand that not all graphics cards are supported and that AMD cards tend to be the most compatible.  I'm also running Esxi 5.1 update 3 since it's the most up to date version that is compatible with the onboard NIC on my motherboard (an MSI H81I).  Is Esxi 5.1 (free version) compatible with video passthrough?  Are there any other requirements that I haven't mentioned?

Any advice would be most appreciated.

Thanks

[DavoudTeimouri · Accepted solution]

Hi,

Yes you need to Intel-VTd and also I'm not sure about your graphic card compatibility but you need to check it on VMware Compatibility Guide portal.

Also there is no limitation about passthrough on ESXi free.

[Goooober]

Ah ok, hadn't really considered that when choosing the CPU which is disappointing but I was only ever going to be experimenting with it.