Had the same issue, running RTX 3060ti with ubuntu 20.04 on esxi. Hardware is Asus x370 crosshair 3700x. Was working fine, then updated and no longer had a gpu. As of 8/15/22 I tried updating to the latest patch of esxi, was on 7.0 update 1 and installed to update 3 U3f, no change. Tried 22.04 and Manjaro with preconfigured 515.65.01 drivers, no luck. I was able to downgrade to 460.84 in Manjaro and get that to work. I can also confirm opensource driver 515.65.01 does work on Manjaro with kernel 5.4.210-1 using the manual install path from guide https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-install-the-nvidia-drivers-on-manjaro-linux and using -m=kernel-open with the .run download. Then added options nvidia NVreg_OpenRmEnableUnsupportedGpus=1 in /etc/modprobe.d/nvidia.conf
and rebooted and I now have a working nvidia-smi output.
