I unlocked Nvidia’s professional GPU features on my consumer graphics card

Nvidia has maintained both a popular consumer and professional lineup for its GPUs for the longest time. While these GPUs might share the same underlying architecture, that’s about where the similarities end. Professional-grade Nvidia cards use specialized, signed Nvidia drivers, which “unlock” additional features.

This led me down a rabbit hole, and I emerged with a solution to split my aging GTX 1050 Ti into multiple vGPUs to use with a virtual machine. Unfortunately, as you’ll soon find out, this is not an intuitive process and has severe hardware restrictions.