Virtual Shared Graphics Acceleration (vSGA) enables sharing a physical GPU across multiple virtual desktops.

To provide GPU hardware acceleration to VMs, you can use one of the following graphics accelerations:
  • Virtual Shared Graphics Acceleration (vSGA).
  • Virtual Shared Graphics Passthrough Graphics Acceleration (vGPU/DVX).
  • Virtual Dedicated Graphics Acceleration (vDGA).

With vSGA, the physical GPUs in the ESXi host are virtualized and shared across multiple VMs.

Figure 1. High-level architecture of vSGA

Architecture Diagram Showing the Virtual Shared Graphics Acceleration

Graphics Acceleration Types Comparison

The following table compares the features of the three types of graphics acceleration.

Table 1. Types of graphics acceleration
vSGA vGPU/DVX vDGA
Consolidation High (limited by video memory) Up to 1:32 None (1:1)
Performance Level Lightweight to mid-level Mid-level or Workstation Workstation
Application Compatibility Limited All supported versions All supported versions
Maximum DirectX Level
  • vSphere 7.0 Update 2 or later
  • DirectX 11.0 / SM5.0
 All supported versions All supported versions
Maximum OpenGL version
  • vSphere 8.0 or later
  • OpenGL 4.3
 All supported versions All supported versions
Video encoding and decoding Software Hardware Hardware
OpenCL or CUDA compute No Yes Yes
vSphere vMotion Support Yes Limited No
Microsoft Virtualization-based Security (VBS) Yes No No

Use Case for vSGA Graphics

vSGA is designed to address the knowledge worker use case where the graphics load is usually low. The knowledge workers use various non-specialized end-user applications that do not demand complex models to render.

Advantages of vSGA

The use of vSGA results in enhanced manageability, streamlined consolidation, and efficiency.

Manageability
vSGA supports the following features which allow an Administrator to easily manage their infrastructure at scale.
  • Suspend and resume a VM.
  • VM migration with vMotion.
  • Guest operating system and ESXi host driver compatibility across vSphere versions.
  • vSphere DRS for initial placement of VMs and load-balancing.
Consolidation

vSGA allows efficient use of hardware acceleration by leveraging VMs with different performance requirements on a single GPU.

The elasticity of vSGA allows a higher density of VMs per graphics card compared to vGPU and DVX solutions.

Hardware Requirements for Hardware Accelerated Graphics

For more information about the hardware requirements for graphics acceleration solutions, see the following table.

Table 2. Hardware requirements for graphics acceleration
Component Description
Physical Space for Graphics Cards Many high-end graphics cards are full-height, full-length, and double-width. Most of them take two slots on the motherboard but use a single PCIe x16 slot. To accommodate the selected GPU card in the appropriate PCIe slot, verify that the ESXi host has enough disk space.
Host Power Supply Units (PSU) Check the power requirements of the GPU and cooling requirements of the server to make sure that the PSU is powerful enough and contains the proper power cables to power the GPU.
Two Display Adapters If the ESXi host does not have an extra graphics adapter, you can install an additional low-end display adapter to act as a primary display adapter. If the GPU is set as a primary display for the ESXi host, vSGA cannot use the GPU for rendering. If two GPUs are installed, the server BIOS might have the option to select which GPU is primary and which is secondary.