GTX drivers become crippled when the card detects the presence of a virtual environment. This means you can't run GTX in the cloud, otherwise, cloud GPU prices would be much lower. Without the availability of GTX, we've been trying just about everything at Paperspace to bring prices down and make the cloud a viable option for GPU compute. The argument being, there are real benefits to running in the cloud like on-demand scalability, lack of upkeep, minimal upfront costs, and of course, running a production application :) There are other indirect cost saving eg power consumption which can be quite significant when training models for long periods of time. Would love to see a total cost of ownership figure added to this post.
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Citation please for the crippled drivers?
The citation is we're building a GPU cloud and have tested almost every GPU in existence :) Just kidding, here are a few examples:
http://vfio.blogspot.com.au/2014/08/vfiovga-faq.html https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/2twq7q/nvidia_appare... https://www.redhat.com/archives/libvirt-users/2014-October/m...
I just quickly googled this so there are probably better sources. Some of these are old but I can tell you firsthand that this is still the case.
There are workarounds for certain hypervisors (KVM mainly) but it's very unlikely that this would be deployed in a production environment.