MAC: Renderslave in virtual Machine with GPU pass-through
Posted: Sun Apr 19, 2020 9:20 am
Good Morning Octanians,
i am wondering, if anybody here has experience in using a virtual machine with GPU pass-through as a render slave on a Mac.
As NVIDIA and Apple probably never return to a state of peace and with the ongoing lack of drivers for Mojave or Catalina, i am looking for alternative ways to add an RTX card to my setup - without having the requirement to keep my Windows Systems running. Maybe AMD cards will be a proper option when Big Navi comes around, but for now the NVIDIA options are simply more attractive to me.
My primary system is a Macbook Pro 16" - i9 2,3gz - Radeon Pro 5500M.
With Octane X and Metal support around the corner, which would solve at least any view port issues on the main system, i am considering an additional 2080 in an external enclosure and using direct pass-through to a Windows Virtual Machine, in vmware fusion, to use it as directly-connected slave. (note: vmware fusion has AFAIK no official egpu support, however i saw some workarounds to make it accept removable devices as GPU - so at this point this setup idea is a wild guess to me)
I am aware that using a Intel NUC or any other micro build and just using it as normal slave, will be less problematic and probably having better performance.
Any thoughts? I tried the search function but i am either blind or this topic was indeed never discussed
Kind regards
nams
i am wondering, if anybody here has experience in using a virtual machine with GPU pass-through as a render slave on a Mac.
As NVIDIA and Apple probably never return to a state of peace and with the ongoing lack of drivers for Mojave or Catalina, i am looking for alternative ways to add an RTX card to my setup - without having the requirement to keep my Windows Systems running. Maybe AMD cards will be a proper option when Big Navi comes around, but for now the NVIDIA options are simply more attractive to me.
My primary system is a Macbook Pro 16" - i9 2,3gz - Radeon Pro 5500M.
With Octane X and Metal support around the corner, which would solve at least any view port issues on the main system, i am considering an additional 2080 in an external enclosure and using direct pass-through to a Windows Virtual Machine, in vmware fusion, to use it as directly-connected slave. (note: vmware fusion has AFAIK no official egpu support, however i saw some workarounds to make it accept removable devices as GPU - so at this point this setup idea is a wild guess to me)
I am aware that using a Intel NUC or any other micro build and just using it as normal slave, will be less problematic and probably having better performance.
Any thoughts? I tried the search function but i am either blind or this topic was indeed never discussed
Kind regards
nams
