Just wanted to throw my $.02 in. I was able following this thread to get my AMD 5870 passed through to a Win 7 guest using a P55 board and an i7 860! The only issue I see is when I put the machine to sleep it doesn't appear to re-init the VGA card upon waking up so I need to shutdown the machine. Other than that, it is stellar. I installed Borderlands 2 and gave it a go and it runs smooth as can be with maxed settings.
Now I just need to try and up the ram from 2GB to 4 or 8 for Windows. I set it low as I read there was an issue with ESXi in here but didn't recall the fix (PCI hole?) for yesterdays install. I left the VM console vga card in the guest and set to only show the desktop on the 2nd monitor.
Here are the system specs:
ESXi 5.0 u1 (will try with 5.1 here in a bit)
Intel i7 860
Gigabyte GA-P55A-UD4P (I had to contact Gigabyte to request a special BIOS file which enables VT-d)
16GB of ram
XFX OC'd AMD 5870 passed through
USB hub passed through
Nvidia GT220 for the host console
Here was my process:
Flashed new BIOS image
Enabled VT-d by going into new hidden menu (CTRL+F1 <- not mentioned by Gigabyte)
Install ESXi making sure VT-d shows as enabled
Install Win7 as a guest
Install ALL updates, DirectX, .net, java, etc
Set the card and USB to be passed through to the guest and restarted ESXi
Installed the ATI drivers (everything except the CCC)
Rebooted the VM and voila!!
Question: Is there a way to set ESXi not to require a vga card for output? This way I could pass a vid card and my HBA to guest. I am using ZFS as my storage backend and would like either ZFSGuru or OpenIndiana to house my ZFS pools and export out for VM and other storage as well as running a gaming VM.