What is the most likely contributor to performance degradation when using a virtualized environment with NVIDIA GPUs?

In a virtualized environment, GPUs can be shared among multiple virtual machines (VMs). Overcommitting GPU resources refers to the practice of allocating more virtual GPUs (vGPUs) to VMs than the physical GPU can support. This can lead to performance degradation because when multiple VMs demand GPU resources simultaneously, the physical GPU becomes a bottleneck. The oversubscription can cause contention for resources, which means that not all VMs can access the full GPU performance they require.

By allowing more VMs to use the GPU resources than there are available, each VM may not perform optimally, leading to slower processing times and reduced efficiency. Therefore, managing GPU resource allocation carefully is critical in a virtualized environment to ensure optimal performance and minimize degradation due to resource contention.

In contrast, using high-performance networking, enabling high availability features, or running VMs on SSD storage does not inherently degrade GPU performance. These factors might enhance overall system performance or reliability but do not directly relate to the contention issues arising from overcommitting GPU resources.