IOMMU is a generic name for Intel VT-d and AMD-Vi.

If anything goes wrong, you will at least have a way to control your host machine this way. You will probably want to have a spare monitor or one with multiple input ports connected to different GPUs (the passthrough GPU will not display anything if there is no screen plugged in and using a VNC or Spice connection will not help your performance), as well as a mouse and a keyboard you can pass to your virtual machine. All GPUs from 2012 and later should support this, as Microsoft made UEFI a requirement for devices to be marketed as compatible with Windows 8.

If you can find any ROM in this list that applies to your specific GPU and is said to support UEFI, you are generally in the clear.

It is not always easy to tell at a glance whether or not this is the case, but there is a fairly comprehensive list on the matter on the Xen wiki as well as Wikipedia:List of IOMMU-supporting hardware.

Both the chipset and the BIOS must support it.

Your motherboard must also support IOMMU.

CPUs from the K10 generation (2007) do not have an IOMMU, so you need to have a motherboard with a 890FX or 990FX chipset to make it work, as those have their own IOMMU.

All AMD CPUs from the Bulldozer generation and up (including Zen) should be compatible.

List of compatible Intel CPUs (Intel VT-x and Intel VT-d).

Your CPU must support hardware virtualization (for kvm) and IOMMU (for the passthrough itself).

You will not be able to do this on your machine unless the following requirements are met : For more information on techniques see the background presentation (pdf).Ī VGA Passthrough relies on a number of technologies that are not ubiquitous as of today and might not be available on your hardware.

Provided you have a desktop computer with a spare GPU you can dedicate to the host (be it an integrated GPU or an old OEM card, the brands do not even need to match) and that your hardware supports it (see #Prerequisites), it is possible to have a virtual machine of any OS with its own dedicated GPU and near-native performance. Starting with Linux 3.9 and recent versions of QEMU, it is now possible to passthrough a graphics card, offering the virtual machine native graphics performance which is useful for graphic-intensive tasks. The Open Virtual Machine Firmware ( OVMF) is a project to enable UEFI support for virtual machines.

Qemu virtual machine tutorial