Flex 170 GPU from Intel - Subscription Free GPU Accelerated VDI on Proxmox 8.1

Like most thing in Windows, the sauce is buried under layers of Registry tweaks and/or Group Policies, but enabling RemoteFX (released with Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1) for RDP enables both h.264/h.265 stream compression, and with additional settings changes to enforce usage of the GPU on the desktop session over RDP, you can get solid 3D acceleration. In this video from Wendell @ Level1Techs, he had 31 virtual desktop instances all running with full GPU acceleration, with RDP as the VDI client software. [VIDEO] . As another data point, I had game developers remoting into their workstations during Quarantine, using RDP with full graphics acceleration using the same tweaks. What the shinier VDI/Remote Desktop solutions like Sunshine+Moonlight, Parsec, Horizon, Citrix do for you is make all of this easier to set up and use. But as far as capability is concerned, RDP is quite powerful and quite capable, assuming you jump through the hoops to set it up right.

gpu passthrough for VMs is not supported on apple silicon period afaik. there may be some "native" renderer built on top of metal but apple doesn't support SR-IOV or "headless passthrough". [LINK] otoh no, it is not "more or less [automatic]" in other hardware either, SR-IOV has been on the enthusiast wishlist for a ridiculously long time now because basically nobody implements it (or, they restrict it to the most datacenter-y of products). intel iGPUs from the HD/UHD Intel Graphics Technology era have a concept called GVT-g which isn't quite SR-IOV but generally does the thing. Newer Xe-based iGPUs do not support this, nor do the discrete graphics cards. AMD's iGPUs do not have anything at all afaik. Their dGPUs don't even implement reset properly, which is becoming a big problem with people trying to set up GPU clouds for AI stuff - a lot of times the AMD machines will need a hard power reset to come back. NVIDIA GPUs do work properly, and do implement SR-IOV properly... but they only started letting you do passthrough recently, and only 1 VM instance per card (so, 1 real + 1 virtual). Curious what you're using (I'm guessing intel iGPU or nvidia dGPU) but generally this is still something that gets Wendell Level1techs hot and bothered about the mere possibility of this feature being in something without a five-figure subscription attached. [VIDEO] It does suck that Apple refuses to implement vulkan support (or sign graphics drivers), I think that's de-facto how people inter

There are new VDI contenders still coming up though. This caught my attention recently (due to trialling Proxmox for another purpose): [VIDEO] There's clearly still demand for VDI solutions too. A recent example: [LINK]

Some counter points. On the die size argument, which I see being echoed a lot online: Why would a customer care or factor that into their purchasing decisions? Saying that these dGPUs with large dies are what is going to put Intel out of business is ludicrous and the Xe cores are shared amongst many of Intel's most lucrative products. You can afford larger dies on N4 compared to when the 40-series were launched. It's no longer the leading edge node and yields have likely improved. dGPUs have pretty expensive GDDR modules, I do not have data on the exact proportion but I would bet that the memory modules is the more important line item. BoM matters less on lower volume (compared to mobile SoCs) dGPU units. Masks masks, R&D and validation are big fixed up-front costs. Recurring software support is also independent of how many units get sold. Xe cores are shared by many Intel products (client & server CPUs, datacenter GPUs and gaming GPUs). B580 is widely popular for gamers, Intel cannot keep up the demand at the moment. I doubt they need to unlock SRIOV on the gaming segment dGPUs to get rid of stock, as you seem to suggest. Their datacenter GPUs [1] offer support for SRIOV, as you probably already know, so I assume you are bemoaning market segmentation. [1] [VIDEO] -- Wendell's video on Flex 170 GPU from Intel - Subscription Free GPU Accelerated VDI on Proxmox 8.1