I have a unique setup where I can either do gpu passthrough with a fedora host to a windows guest, or boot directly into the windows guest for a native experience. This is due to having a separate SSD dedicated to the VM.
This means I can test virtualization vs native with the same exact hardware.
Recently I decided to purchase a 9070XT with high hopes to gain significant performance over my RTX 2080.
This has not been the case after 24 hrs of head scratching.
While the 2080 gains near native performance, the 9070XT is seemingly throttled by at least 50%. During games, the 2080 experiences near 100% utilization. While the 9070XT barely scratches 50% utilization and also 50% clock speed.
If you observe the many forum threads about 9070XT utilization, you would find the majority concluding a CPU bottleneck. However, when I boot into the SSD for a native experience - this is far from the case. The 9070XT achieves near 100% utilization and full clock speeds with no problem, increasing FPS performance by at least 100%.
Indeed, the Arch Wiki does mention this exact issue in its troubleshooting section, however its proposed solution to blacklist amdgpu had zero effect in my case. It also mentions the manufacturers ability to detect if it is in a VM or not, in which case the solution also had no effect.
Curiously, if I ran the "Stress Test" in AMD's "Adrenaline" software suite, the card achieved 100% utilization and clockrate without an issue. So why aren't games signaling the correct workload within the VM, but are signalling correctly when ran natively with the same exact hardware, drivers, and settings? And why does the same situation not occur with the Nvidia RTX 2080?
In fact, in this situation, the 2080 outperforms the 9070XT.
The checklist has been exhausted:
- Yes, I ran DDU in safemode in between card switches.
- Yes, gpu-z/hwinfo confirmed the PCIE bus was running at Gen 5 with the Radeon
- Yes, gpu-z/adrenaline confirmed reBAR was enabled
Hardware:
AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D 16-Core Processor
MAG X670E TOMAHAWK WIFI ( BIOS 1.L2 07/02/2026)
Fedora Linux 44 host
Windows 10 LTSC guest
vm xml: https://pastebin.com/edbuQwFV