[vfio-users] Nvidia GTX970 overheat in game with vgapassthrough

[John Koelndorfer]

Hi Ivan,

I also have a EVGA GTX 970 and have experienced similar issues with
graphical corruption and outright crashes. I was able to fix it by
installing MSI Afterburner and downclocking my GPU. I also set a custom
profile for fan control so that the GPU runs cooler.

The working configuration for me is to downclock memory and GPU by 100 MHz.
I have my fan set at a minimum of 30% and scale up as the temperature
increases. I didn't go through a very exhaustive process for testing what
the minimum downclock and fan speeds are, so you may want to play with it.
Note that just adjusting the fan didn't solve the issue for me. I suspect
that the actual issue is that they undervolted the GPU to make it run
cooler.

Date: Sat, 22 Jul 2017 11:40:33 +0000
> From: Ivan Volosyuk <ivan.volosyuk at gmail.com>
> To: vfio-users <vfio-users at redhat.com>
> Subject: [vfio-users] Nvidia GTX970 overheat in game with
>         vgapassthrough
> Message-ID:
>         <CAJ1=CigH_tpxs4Y+s+KN_ruLicbf_TYvHcE_eRh+3OomFmyymg@
> mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
> I was using KVM/QEMU vga-passthrough successfully for some time now and
> haven't seen much issues with my configuration.Yesterday, I
> installed PLAYERUNKNOWN'S BATTLEGROUNDS and I noticed something which looks
> like GPU overheating issue:
> Initially the game works fine. I noticed that GPU fan starts rotating when
> a few seconds into the game. In about 5 to 10 minutes I start noticing
> corruption on 3d models, and after a while entire screen can be filled with
> a few huge triangles starting at the screen center. When I switch to
> Windows 8.1 application menu sometimes I see corruption in form of small
> random squares a few pixels in size:
> https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B8b6GsDnUyVic2FVdDRVbHM2Zjg
>
> I was playing other games like, StarCraft2, H1Z1, CS:GO without a problem
> before. It might be that the game stresses to much my graphic card. IDK.
>
> I run qemu via shell script:
> https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B8b6GsDnUyViWHRCcVRWOUFuU2M
>
> Linux localhost 4.11.4
> QEMU emulator version 2.9.0
> Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4790K CPU @ 4.00GHz with water cooling
> 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GM204 [GeForce GTX
> 970]
>
> Guest:
> Win8.1
> MSI for GPU
>
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