Tag: gpu

AMD Passthrough in Unraid

Posted on by Evan Laske
XFX Radeon RX 6800 QICK 319
XFX Speedster XICK 319 Radeon RX 6800 Black

Recently, I tried my iRacing / NAS rig in VR with an Oculus Quest 2 that a friend of mine brought over. However, after fiddling with some settings to make it not look like crap, it seems like either the CPU (hopefully fixed here) or the current 1080Ti is holding it back. Though I would love to upgrade to a 30-series Ampere GPU, the new Navi AMD GPUs are actually better at traditional rasterization workloads (at least per dollar). Given the 1080Ti’s performance, it’s actually quite difficult to beat it on any sort of budget. However, really any GPU is hard to come by these days as we’re in the midst of a global silicon shortage. Luckily, I was able to get my hands on an XFX Speedster XICK 319 Radeon RX 6800 Black from Best Buy with 10 windows open, wildly refreshing during Best Buy’s last restocking. Unlike the nVidia GPUs, however, AMD’s have been previously plagued with a reset bug which requires rebooting the host OS when the guest is shutdown / booted up. Combine this with the RX 6800s being quite new, there’s a few complications involved in getting Unraid AMD passthrough running.

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unRAID Pascal GPU Passthrough

Posted on by Evan Laske

I decided recently to move on from my Synology NAS as the core storage / server device in my network infrastructure. I have re-purposed my previous gaming machine to become a heavier-duty server. There will be more to come on this setup later. I chose unRAID because I wanted it to also serve dual-duty as a living room gaming machine. One of the major advantages of unRAID is that it provides a good front-end to KVM virtualization under the hood. In order to enable nearly bare-metal performance on a VM, you have to direct-pass through a GPU to the VM. However, as we find this is not straightforward with nVidia cards.

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