[bravetraveler]

I found the most gains in terms of... latency consistency. I had a VM with a GPU passed through for gaming. With the cores appropriately pinned, especially away from host tasks, there were no more random DPC latency spikes.

With no pinning they'd randomly go into the milliseconds -- with pinning it would stay in the micro second range!

The result of this is games (and likely audio) performing much more favorably.

How much of this is cache coherency/in-fighting, scheduling, or simply host usage; I couldn't tell you. I was just happy to have my VM 'feel' native.

There will always be a benefit with pinning vCPUs on the same NUMA nodes as their devices (VFIO or even SR-IOV). This is becoming increasingly important on hypervisors