Well, they're working fairly consistently, (aside from an odd issue where the server reboots when I put heavy load on the GPUs...) so I guess I can't be TOO frustrated with PCI passthrough.
Ok, well, now I guess I gotta retract my last post. Even after removing the pciHole.start = 2048 setting from my VMs, I'm able to boot them up just fine. Every once in a long while, one of them will show recovery mode, then reboot and go all the way into Windows just fine.
I know this is it a bit of a thread necro, but I wanted to share that I'd fought with PCI passthrough of GPUs on ESXi 8.0 for a while and this thread really helped me solve my problems. I had a 5080 passed through to a Win 2022 VM and the VM would keep booting up into recovery mode for some...