siruba's Posts

The R9 290 (basically the same card as 290x) I have used with ESXi 5.5 would not pass through properly in 5.1. After choosing the card+audio (along with some USB controllers) for passthrough and reboot the host, it simply reverts itself - only the USB controller remains in the list and the 290 is back unchecked. This should be a general bug of the 5.1 line. PCI passthrough had been a mess during that time. I have finally bought a R9 270x which is just a rebranded last generation chip with improved clock, and it worked perfectly with 5.5. I would imagine the same goes for R9 280x (though I haven't tried one myself), that would be the best card available which work properly with passthrough.

I had this exact same set up planned, but sad to report it does not work with R9 290. Like you mentioned, it worked for the first time the vm host is boot up, and the first start up of the guest. However, if the guest is restarted, the graphics card just seemed to be locked up. On the next boot the display would be back to the VMware SVGA adapter, and the AMD card shows up with an error in device manager ("Windows has stopped this device because it has reported problems"). The only way to get the card to work again is to reboot the esx 5.5 host. I have another AMD 5770 which worked flawlessly as expected (which made me shell out the cash for the 290...). Hopefully it is just software problem which could be fixed.