GPU not recognized/utilized in Workstation Pro 16

[bkrumeich]

Good evening.

running a Win 10 PRO host (19042), trying to get the VM (Win 10 PRO, 18363) to recognize my RTX 3090.

Latest version of VMWare Workstation PRO 16.1, VMWare Tools 11.1.5.

Accelerate 3D Graphics is set for the VM, 4 GB Vram assigned. Limited to 1 Monitor (Host has 2 connected).

Hardware acceleration configured in the host OS.

If i start a DX11 application, i get VERY low framerates/performance, and MSI Afterburner on the host shows NO increase in clock speed on the GPU (idling at around 300 Mhz), which to me looks as if the CPU is doing the GPU work in the VM.

System Speccs host: 3900X, 64GB, RTX3090.

I spent the last couple of hours trying to find a solution, but no luck. Any help would be appreciated.

mbr

B.Krumeich

[wila]

Hi,

If i start a DX11 application, i get VERY low framerates/performance, and MSI Afterburner on the host shows NO increase in clock speed on the GPU (idling at around 300 Mhz), which to me looks as if the CPU is doing the GPU work in the VM.

That's about right.
VMware Workstation does not offer PCIe passthrough.

The guest only ever gets to see a virtualized GPU, never the real one. Depending on the task at hand it will hand off work to the GPU or the CPU.
Sadly you have no control over that yourself.

--
Wil

[bkrumeich]

I am not 100% convinced this is correct.

I know there is no PCIe passthrough on Workstation Pro, BUT the same usecase (same DX11 application) performs with up to 100 FPS (and ofc putting load on the GPU) on other user systems (same GPU, 5950X) with the same VM version.

[wila · Accepted solution]

Hi,

That's why I said "Depending on the task at hand it will hand off work to the GPU or the CPU."

Of course it can always be a configuration issue.

In your case I would compare the vmware.log's between a good working system and the system that does not perform well and make sure that the rest of the configuration is the same.
For example if the Hyper-V role is enabled or not.

--
Wil

[bkrumeich]

Thx Wila.

Disabling Hyper-V in the host did the trick. I was under the impression VMWare Pro would warn/not even start with this feature enabled (based on a couple of posts). Seems i was wrong.

Getting > 300 FPS now in Heaven benchmark.

Thx & my best regards

B. Krumeich

[ID_Robotics]

I just got my new MSI GS75 with I7-10875 8-Core, 32GB, RTX2060 (6GB), and 2x 2TB Samsung EVO 970 Plus NVMe in Raid 1, W10 Pro.

I read Workstation 16 was supposed to be near native graphics performance so I downloaded a W10 Enterprise development VM from Microsoft to play with (free but only good for 90 days).

I also downloaded Heaven benchmark 4.0.

I set up the VM to use 4 CPUs and 2 cores each and the guest OS verifies 8 cores in the task manager.

I set up the 3D graphics acceleration and assigned 3GB graphics memory to the guest.

My system still would not use the graphics acceleration and the framerates were terrible, around 14fps and the system in general was sluggish to input.

Since my system is a laptop it also has Intel Integrated graphics on GPU-0 and the RTX 2060 is GPU 1.

For whatever reason, what ultimately worked for me is not to launch VMWare Workstation but rather right click on VMWare Workstation Player and tell it to run with the NVidia graphics processor not the default graphics processor.

Testing DirectX on High Quality, I get: 

FPS 124.7, Score 3141, MinFPS 9.4, MaxFPS 237.3

Testing OpenGL on the same settings I get:

FPS 78.8, Score 1984, MinFPS 13.9, MaxFPS 139.8

There is still a detectable stutter once in a while but it is barely noticeable.  I'm sure it would not affect gameplay.  I am still working on fine tuning to see if I can get rid of that.  Its really interesting that DirectX returned better results.  Though I think I noticed more stutter in the DirectX but that is subjective.

The host task manager shows about 85-90% gpu usage during the benchmark test, while the Intel Integrated graphics show 20-35% reflecting the graphics usage on the host.

I don't know if any of this is helpful in your case or not, but it is what is working for me.

[bence951024]

Hi,

Did VMware recognize your GPU's performance, if yes how did you do it?

Regards.

[jgodean2]

"For whatever reason, what ultimately worked for me is not to launch VMWare Workstation but rather right click on VMWare Workstation Player and tell it to run with the NVidia graphics processor not the default graphics processor."

Is that a Windows only option?  I'm not seeing any options when I right click to start the player.  Is there some trick or setting that needs to be applied to get it to offer to use the NVidia graphics processor.