Techniques disclosed herein provide an approach for using receive side scaling (RSS) offloads from a physical network interface controller (PNIC) to improve the performance of a virtual network interface controller (VNIC). In one embodiment, the PNIC is configured to write hash values it computes for RSS purposes to packets themselves. The VNIC then reads the hash values from the packets and places the packets into VNIC RSS queues, which are processed by respective CPUs, based on the hash values. CPU overhead is thereby reduced, as RSS processing by the VNIC no longer requires computing hash values. In another embodiment in which the number of PNIC RSS queues and VNIC RSS queues are identical, the VNIC may map packets from PNIC RSS queues to VNIC RSS queues using the PNIC RSS queue ID numbers, which also does not require the computing RSS hash values.