What if you could use your gaming graphics card for processes like gaming, video rendering and mining altogether?
Sounds great, right? This has become possible after a group hacked some graphics cards and enabled GPU virtualization on them. This might sound weird but Nvidia uses the same silicon on professional and gaming graphics cards. What separates them is the driver and once it is hacked, they both work similarly.
The cost of professional Nvidia GPUs like the Quadro series are way higher than the gaming cards and this is for a reason as they are able to use GPU virtualization for increasing productivity. You can either use a single graphics cards for multiple VM(Virtual Machines) or you can use multiple graphics cards to spread the workload on a single VM.
This allows tasks like Video streaming, rendering, mining, and gaming to be done simultaneously on the same GPU. Graphics cards are, therefore, way better in terms of providing the horsepower to these applications compared to a CPU and the recent hack made some of the Geforce GPUs compatible with the NVIDIA virtual GPU software.
The task is done by replacing the device ID of a gaming graphics card with a supported professional graphics card and the job is done easily. There is step by step instructions listed on GitHub from where users can implement this. From the code below, you can see the compatible graphics cards for enabling Virtualization.
The method is compatible with Linux and with KVM software but unfortunately, no support on Windows operating system. So, most PC users won’t get the VGPU benefit.
