Passthrough is workable right now. It’s a pain to get set up, but it is workable.
You don’t need vgpu to get the job done. I’ve had two set ups over time: one based on a jank old secondary gpu that is used by the vm host, another based on just using the jank integrated graphics on my chip.
Even still, I dual boot because it just works. It always works, and boot times are crazy low for Windows these days. No fighting with drivers. No fighting with latency issues for non-passthrough devices. It all just works.
Oh I'm aware of passthrough. It's just a complete second class citizen because it isn't really virtualization, it's a hack. Virtualization is about multiplexing hardware. Passthrough is the opposite of multiplexing hardware: it's about yanking a peripheral from your host system and shoving it into one single guest VM. The fact that this yanking is poorly supported and has poor UX makes complete sense.
I consider true peripheral multiplexing with true GPU virtualization to be the way of the future. It's true virtualization and doesn't even require you to sacrifice and/or babysit a single PCIe connected GPU. Passthrough is just a temporary hacky workaround that people have to apply now because there's nothing better.
In the best case scenario - with hardware SR-IOV support plus basic driver support for it, enabling GPU access in your VM with SR-IOV would be a simple checkbox in the virtualization software of the host. GPU passthrough can't ever get there in terms of usability.
I guess I don't really see the benefit of "true" virtualization, other than it's usability improvements. I generally want to squeeze out ever bit of performance out of the GPU if I care to share it with the guest at all (at least on my home machine). I'd be using it for playing games.
For the cloud, I could imagine wanting vGPUs so you can shard the massive GPUs that are used there. But in cloud, you would then have a single device be multi-tenant, which is a bit spicy security wise. Passthrough has a very straightforward security model.
I have a Quadro card and at least for Windows guests I can easily move the card between running guests (Linux has some problems with yanking though). Still, virtualized GPUs would be nice.
It works with some cards, not with others. Eg. for Radeon Pro W5500 there's no known card reset method that works (no method from https://github.com/gnif/vendor-reset works) so I had to do S3 suspend before running a VM with systemctl suspend or with rtcwake -m mem -s 2
You don’t need vgpu to get the job done. I’ve had two set ups over time: one based on a jank old secondary gpu that is used by the vm host, another based on just using the jank integrated graphics on my chip.
Even still, I dual boot because it just works. It always works, and boot times are crazy low for Windows these days. No fighting with drivers. No fighting with latency issues for non-passthrough devices. It all just works.