GPU passthrough and Spice

Incus
1

Hi,

I’m looking for some clarification about how to best optimise video performance when connecting via RDP/Spice etc.

My host is Debian 13 with Incus 6.15. The host has a GTX 1050 Ti which I am passing through to a Debian 13 VM, along with an Intel 82580 NIC.

My Windows 11 PC has Incus client and virt-viewer installed and I am currently using incus console debian --type=vga to connect to the Debian VM for daily use as I only want to use Windows 11 for gaming.

The VMs disk is on a ZFS mirror backed by SATA HDDs. It has 2 CPUs from the host and 8GB of RAM.
sudo lspci in the VM shows the Red Hat Virtio GPU and the GTX 1050 Ti

When I connect (which if I understand correctly, is using Spice), there is some video lag.
Is this approach taking advantage of the GTX 1050 Ti in any way? Is there a better approach?

Do I need to do this – https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers#trixie-550 ? (SecureBoot is enabled on the host and mokutil --sb-state says SecureBoot enable in the guest)

Thanks for any guidance,
Stephen

2

You can try to explicitly disable the Virtio GPU device with raw.qemu.conf, see the examples in this documentation link: Instance options - Incus documentation.

It is also possible it is just a Spice issue, you can check if this is the case using Gnome or KDE’s built-in RDP servers (both of which can be set in their respective settings app)

3

Thanks for your reply, I’m still working on this and am going to attempt adding a MOK key and installing the nVidia driver.