Requirements

Minimum

The most basic requirement to make use of Looking Glass is to have a system with two GPUs, the following configurations are valid:

• Two discrete GPUs (dGPU)

• A discrete GPU and an integrated (iGPU) such as is common in laptops.

• A discrete GPU or iGPU and a virtual GPU (vGPU) as supported by some hardware.

Note

Please be aware that iGPU users may be limited in the resolution and refresh rate possible with Looking Glass due to the memory bandwidth limitations imposed due to the iGPU sharing system RAM for GPU usage.

Looking Glass aims to achieve the lowest possible latency and as such it is important that you do not overload your system. The minimum recommended CPU to obtain a decent experience with Looking Glass is 6 cores or more, with Hyper-threading (>= 12 threads).

PCIe bandwidth can also be a limiting factor, as such both GPUs should have a minimum of 8 lanes (x8) at PCIe3 speeds, or 4 lanes (x4) at PCIe4 speeds.

The GPU used for the guest virtual machine must have either a physical monitor attached to it, or a cheap dummy plug. The guest operating system (most notably Windows) will disable the GPU output if there is nothing attached to it and Looking Glass will not be able to function. If you are using a vGPU the virtual device should already have a virtual monitor attached to it negating this requirement.

Recommended

At this time the recommended configuration is as follows:

• CPU 8 cores (16 threads) or better @ 3.0GHz or faster (full cores, not efficiency cores).

• Two discrete GPUs consisting of:

  • AMD or Intel brand GPU for the client application (usually your host system).

  • NVIDIA brand GPU for the guest system (virtual machine).

The reason for these recommendations are as follows:

AMD or Intel for the client

AMD and Intel both support the DMABUF feature which enables offloading memory transfers to the GPU hardware. Please note that making use of this feature requires loading the KVMFR kernel module.

Additionally AMD GPUs suffer stability issues when operating as a passthrough device and as such we do not recommend their usage for such purposes. Models of note that have issues include but are not limited to the entire Polaris, Vega, Navi and BigNavi GPU series. Vega and Navi are notably the worst and should be avoided for virtualization usage.

NVIDIA for the guest

NVIDIA unlike AMD do not seem to suffer from the same stability issues as AMD GPUs when operating as a passthrough GPU, however due to the closed source nature of their drivers NVIDIA can not make use of the DMABUF feature in the Linux kernel and as such it is not recommended for use as the host GPU.

It has been said that the open-source NVIDIA drivers as of release 525 will enable this support and we have made changes to an experiemental branch to support this, however until NVIDIA release this version and we can test these changes against the driver, support will not be included in the release builds of Looking Glass.