With the latest Intel Hades Canyon now being able to run ESXi, a number of folks have been interested in taking advantage of the integrated GPU that is included in the system. There are two models of the Hades Canyon, NUC8i7HNK which is the lower end system with Radeon RX Vega M and the NUC8i7HVK which is the higher end system with Radeon RX Vega GH. One of the first thing I had attempted after getting ESXi working on the Hades Canyon was to try to enable passthrough of the iGPU into a Windows GuestOS but in all my attempts, it resulted into a PSOD'ing the ESXi host once you start installing the AMD Drivers from Intel.

A few days ago, one of my readers, Chris78 shared an update where he was able to prevent the ESXi host from PSOD'ing by adding a VM Advanced Setting but he he was still having issues where the Windows GuestOS would now BSOD. This sounded promising, I figure it would not hurt to gave it a try and to my surprise, I was able to successfully passthrough the iGPU to a Windows 10, Windows Server 2016 and 2019 system from my limited testing. After reporting the success back to Chris78 who was still having issues even after using the settings I had used, his conclusion was there may be a difference between the HNK and HVK models, with the latter having BSOD issues. For now, it seems like iGPU can only be passthrough if you have the NUC8i7HNK model.

Step 1 - Create either a Windows 10 or Windows Server 2016/2019 VM using the vSphere UI (H5 or Embedded Host Client) and I used all the defaults. You can definitely change vCPU, Memory and Disk capacity but you will need to use BIOS Firmware and an E1000E Network Adapter, if you switch it to EFI or VMXNET3, it seems to crash the VM when powering on the VM after attaching the iGPU.

Windows 10

vHW 13 (ESXi 6.5 and later)

BIOS Firmware

2 vCPU

6GB Memory

32GB Disk

E1000E Network Adapter

Windows 2016/2019

vHW 13 (ESXi 6.5 and later)

BIOS Firmware

2 vCPU

8GB Memory

40GB Disk

E1000E Network Adapter

Note: I am using vHW13 because on this system I have ESXi 6.5 Update 2 running which I need to have around for some other testing but this should also work on latest ESXi 6.7 Update 1.

Step 2 - Add the following VM Advanced Setting hypervisor.cpuid.v0 = False, by navigating to VM Options->Advanced->Edit Configuration in the vSphere UI

Step 2 - Install Windows 10 or Window Server 2016/2019 including VMware Tools and applying latest Microsoft updates

Step 3 - Download and Install Radeon RX Vega M Graphics Driver for your Windows OS

Step 4 - If you require the use of Intel Quick Sync Transcoding, you will also need to install Intel HD Graphics Driver for your Windows OS

Here is a screenshot of iGPU passthrough to a Windows 10 system:

Here is a screenshot of iGPU passthrough to a Windows Server 2019 system: