Applications running in virtual machines hosted on vSphere can make use of GPU processing power in two ways.

vSphere DirectPath I/O is a vSphere inherent feature that leverages virtualization technology (VT)-enabled processors configured to the hosts to enhance the performance of virtual machines. General purpose Input Output (GPIO) is a processor feature of Intel/AMD CPUs known as an I/O memory management unit that assigns direct memory access transfers and device interrupts. This way, virtual machines are able to bypass the VMkernel and get direct access to the underlying physical hardware. vMotion is supported with DPIO-enabled server hardware.

Hardware-assisted I/O MMU virtualization is called Intel Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O (VT-d) in Intel processors and AMD I/O Virtualization (AMD-Vi or IOMMU) in AMD processors. It is a function of the chipset that assists virtual machines to get direct access to hardware I/O devices such as network cards, storage controllers, and GPUs.

NVIDIA GRID GPUs support vGPU, which is the capability for multiple users to share a single physical GPU in a virtualized environment. There are three types of hardware-based graphics acceleration configurations possible for Horizon View virtual desktops. vGPU offers the best performance and compatibility options.