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RTX 5090 and Raspberry Pi: Can it game?
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- rcarmo 9mo agoBefore someone else points that out, you missed the opportunity to run Crysis and some schools of thought would consider any kind of gaming benchmark to be invalid due to its absence :)
- 0x1ch 9mo agoMan, I miss that. Every PC build and benchmarking youtuber always went out of their way to keep that meme alive, even as it became increasingly irrelevant. Don't think I've seen anyone mention the phrase in years. :(
- juris 9mo ago:C since you already took "does it run Crysis" I'll take the "does it run Skyrim" one so that Todd Howard can get more ideas.
- xattt 9mo ago> Cyberpunk barely hits 16 FPS average on the Pi 5. This is a lot better than my memories of forcing a Pentium MMX 200 MHz PC with 32 MB SDRAM and an ATI All-in-Wonder Pro of running games from the early 2000s.
- scottjg 9mo agoyou're lucky you didn't get stuck with an S3 ViRGE.
- whaleofatw2022 9mo agoHaha I remember how they couldn't even do transparency in MDK properly. Was a bit faster than software (but hey I suppose if you weren't doing any transparency that makes it easier lol).
- reactordev 9mo agoEverything changed with Voodoo Banshee’s
- iamtheworstdev 9mo agorarely has a company rested so hard on their laurels as 3dFX
- reactordev 9mo agoWhatever, Glide was amazing! So much so that Nvidia bought them. I remember what a huge difference it was having a dedicated 3D card capable of fast 2D and 3D vs the software rasterizer. Yes, NovaLogic games ran better. Yes, you can play Doom at decent FPS. Yes, SpecOps ran at full monitor resolution. They had a LOT to brag about.
- Sohcahtoa82 9mo agoGlide is precisely what made me hate 3dfx and was glad they died. As a developer, I'm sure Glide was great. But as a kid that really wanted a 3dfx Voodoo card for Christmas so I could play all the sweet 3D games that only supported Glide, I was upset when my dad got me a Rendition Verite 2200. But I didn't want to seem ungrateful, so my frustration was pointed to 3dfx for releasing a proprietary API. I was glad that Direct3D and OpenGL quickly surpassed Glide's popularity. But yeah, then 3dfx failed to innovate. IIRC, they lagged behind in 32-bit color rendering support as well as letting themselves get caught with their pants down when NVIDIA released the GeForce and introduced hardware transform which allowed the GPU to be more than just a texturing engine. I think that was the nail in 3dfx's coffin.
- reactordev 9mo agolol, agreed. Today, Glide feels like a predecessor to OpenGL. At the time it was awesome but as soon as DirectX came around along with OpenGL it was over. 1999 was the beginning of the NVidia train. Thanks for the laugh about your disappointment with your dad. I had a similar thing happen with mine when I asked for Doom and him being a Mac guy, he came back with Bungie’s Marathon. I was upset until I played Marathon… I then realized how wise my father was.
- azalemeth 9mo agoI'm pretty sure I completed Morrowind for the first time ever using both wine and a celeron. Likewise before that with VirtualPC (remember that?) on Mac OS (note the space!) and Age of Empires (not even Rise of Rome!). Single-digit FPS can _absolutely_ be playable if you're a desperate enough ten-year-old...
- hparadiz 9mo agoMe trying to run Falcon 4.0 on a 166 mhz P1 with 16 mb of edo ram.
- squeaky-clean 9mo agoWhen I played (original vanilla) WoW I remember getting 2-3 fps in 40 player raids. The cursor wasn't tied to the game's framerate though. So with the right UI layout made from addons I could still be a pretty effective healer. I don't even remember what the dungeons looked like, just a giant grid of health bars, buttons and threat-meter graphs. This would have been on some kind of Pentium 4 with integrated graphics. Not my earliest PC, but the first one I played any games on more advanced than the Microsoft Entertainment Packs.
- kergonath 9mo ago> When I played (original vanilla) WoW I remember getting 2-3 fps in 40 player raids. I had to look at the ground and get the camera as close as possible to cross between the AH and the bank in IF. Otherwise I’d get about 0.1 fps and had to close the game, which meant waiting in line to get back. Those were the days. > So with the right UI layout made from addons I could still be a pretty effective healer. I got pretty good with the timings and could almost play without looking at the screen. But I was DD and it was vanilla so nobody cared if I sucked as long as I got far away with the bombs. > I don't even remember what the dungeons looked like, just a giant grid of health bars, buttons and threat-meter graphs. I was talking a couple of weeks ago with a mate who was MT at the time and told me he knew the feet and legs of all the bosses but never saw the animations or the faces before coming back with an alt a couple of years later. I was happy as a warlock, enjoying the scenery. With a refresh rate that gave me ample time to admire it before the next frame :D
- geerlingguy 9mo agoThere's more comparisons with various Arm hardware and Cyberpunk 2077 over here: https://github.com/geerlingguy/raspberry-pi-pcie-devices/issues/787 https://github.com/geerlingguy/raspberry-pi-pcie-devices/iss... The DGX Spark and Mac Studio are currently the two best Arm-based platforms for running that game, it seems to like a lot of CPU to feed a decent GPU.
- KurSix 9mo agoThat line triggered some deep memories of tweaking config files, dropping resolutions to something barely recognizable, and still calling it a win if the game technically ran
- moffkalast 9mo agoHuh so a Pi 5 is basically a Core 2 Quad according to Geekbench 6, that's fun. It was part of the recommended specs for GTA 4 back in the day, it should run great.
- bigyabai 9mo agoOne advantage of DXVK in this regard is that it fixes a lot of the native stutter present on the PC version of GTA IV: https://youtu.be/aUIhtXzdeZY?t=218 https://youtu.be/aUIhtXzdeZY?t=218
- behnamoh 9mo agoWhat are we supposed to do with this information? It would have been more meaningful if the author tried the GPU card with an old machine, rather than a Raspberry Pi
- guywithahat 9mo agoIdk you can buy a new Pi for cheap and they're all the same, old machines vary and are not always available. I'm certainly not going to do it but it's not uninteresting imo
- juris 9mo agopersonally I was interested in the capabilities of the pci-e bus as I abuse it in every other computer I can get my hands on (the rpi4 really did not like that treatment). to your point about 'meaningful' though, indeed the ole College Try to run Crysis on a Samsung NC-10 would be far more glorious! But I assure you this was very fun for me.
- kergonath 9mo ago> What are we supposed to do with this information? Nothing. It’s just fun. > t would have been more meaningful if the author tried the GPU card with an old machine, rather than a Raspberry Pi But then it would have been lame. Who cares? If your old machine is a x86 less than 10 years old it’s most likely faster than the Pi. But that’s not the point. The point is to pair a cheap fun computer with a humongous and expensive card and see if it works. Because it’s fun.
- matt3210 9mo agoIs that a pi with a gfx card or a gfx card with a pi attached?
- observationist 9mo agoYes. Also, it doesn't seem like it would be all that much more expensive for these high end GPUs to start getting x86/64 SoCs with midrange specs baked in, and these AIO GPUs could be tailor made for standalone AI and gaming applications. If it's the equivalent of a $10 bit of gear in terms of cost, they could charge an additional $100 for the feature, with a SoC optimized for the specs of the GPU - get rid of the need for an eGPU altogether and stream from the onboard host?
- parsimo2010 9mo agoThis is very much a “would you like some coffee with all of your cream?” situation.
- drnick1 9mo agoI think the conclusion here is that Raspberry Pis are now too pricey (especially when factoring in the various required accessories) and rarely make sense for typical desktop use vs. x86 mini-PCs. They make even less sense compared to various used thin clients that can generally be found on eBay.
- KurSix 9mo agoI think the Pi still makes sense when you actually want a Pi
- hamdingers 9mo agoYou're paying a premium for physical compatibility with a ton of niche accessories. Whether or not they make sense depends on how important those accessories are to your use case. That and the prices never really came back down to earth after the chip shortage hikes.
- nomel 9mo ago> You're paying a premium for physical compatibility No. There are a bunch of alternatives with some to full pin compatibility. Some being many times faster [1]. No new projects should use a new Raspberry Pi. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OQ5ascBuCw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OQ5ascBuCw
- rcxdude 9mo agoUnless they want to keep going without needing to swap things out frequently and deal with the extremely poor support that most alternatives get.
- samlinnfer 9mo agoYour video rates the PI as 10 for support, 10 for ease of use and 7 for performance. Just the support and ease of use is enough. You're paying for a mature ecosystem where you know things work and you don't have to waste time struggling.
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- Sevii 9mo agoVery much wish I had gotten a RTX 5090 for local LLMs but it would have doubled the cost of my PC.
- MBCook 9mo agoActually isn’t the cost of a Pi basically a rounding error compared to the 5090 at this point?
- theragra 9mo agoI have extemely weird bug where on Windows, many games crash quickly. My laptop is Lenovo legion 7i pro w/rtx4080. I tried a lot of things, inclusing full windows reinstall, driver rollback, cleaning from dust etc etc. Crash reason is listed as "other" Nvidia driver error code. Bazzite using Proton it works flawlessly. God of war,KCD2 and others. I guess, it will be Linux gaming for me from now on. I am still puzzled why this situation even can be. If you have ideas, be my guest.
- embedding-shape 9mo agoMaybe BIOS or other firmware? No clue, but my GPU also runs better on Linux that Windows today.
- NelsonMinar 9mo agoI had no idea any of this stuff worked well enough to actually run modern games. The FEX emulation layer. The eGPU. It's not how fast this stuff runs that impresses me, it's that it runs at all.
- jacquesm 9mo agoFEX is very impressive.
- ekianjo 9mo agoBox64 was there first
- ValdikSS 9mo agoAnd sometimes quite faster: https://printserver.ink/blog/box64-vs-fex/ https://printserver.ink/blog/box64-vs-fex/
- stefanovic 9mo agoyes, but it's not US-made.
- ekianjo 9mo agoWhy would the origin matter?
- tryauuum 9mo agoeGPU in his case is just a pcie extension cable and slot, what's there to not work. There's no translation layer, pcie all the way
- wincy 9mo agoI assume the “anti-cheat” he brings up in Doom: The Dark Ages is actually Denuvo, which likely would have some issues running, although a January 2025 post on Phoronix indicates maybe it does work, or Denuvo support is being worked on? [0] Doom The Dark Ages is a single player game, so I’m not sure who you’d be cheating against, aside from maybe some real Buzz Killington’s saying you’re “cheating Microsoft by pirating it”. [0] https://www.phoronix.com/news/FEX-Emulator-2501 https://www.phoronix.com/news/FEX-Emulator-2501
- Onawa 9mo agoDenuvo is DRM, not anticheat.
- gjsman-1000 9mo agoDenuvo isn’t quite DRM either. It’s an anti-tamper layer; the whole goal being to prevent the binary from modifications. This then prevents the DRM of choice (ie Steamworks) from being bypassed. I know that sounds a little pedantic; but typically DRM involves an identity layer (who is allowed to access what?). Denuvo doesn’t care about that; it’s even theoretically possible to make a Denuvo protected binary anyone could use.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- wincy 9mo agoRight, I’m pointing out that as a purely single player game, how would one cheat in Doom: The Dark Ages?
- cmxch 9mo agoDenuvo is malware, not anticheat.
- bigyabai 9mo agoMalware is always a matter of perspective.
- jacquesm 9mo agoThis is a funny project. Too many people taking this serious, it is more of a 'can it be done' because the physical interfaces suggest that it should be possible, and then to follow through on it to prove that yes it actually can be done. And tbh much better than I expected it to work. I can imagine that for GPU compute heavy and interconnect bandwidth constrained applications a combination like this might actually be useful. You essentially just added an ethernet port to a 5090, there must be some value in that.
- scottjg 9mo agoi thought my post was already too long to include this, but to your point, you can run AI inference in this setup and the performance can be pretty good.
- colechristensen 9mo agoYeah it is obviously actually useful for AI inference over which the pcie speed isn't particularly important and a single board computer gets you a small system.
- geerlingguy 9mo agoThere are definitely some use cases where it works out, others where it doesn't; I spent a bit of time testing that side of things late last year: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/big-gpus-dont-need-big-pcs/ https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/big-gpus-dont-need-bi...
- scottjg 9mo agoa great post that definitely inspired this one. i link to it in the first paragraph of my blog post.
- geerlingguy 9mo agoI feel like maybe by the end of this year someone with access to a bunch of RTX Pro 6000s will have them running on a Pi or RK3588 lol.
- Havoc 9mo agoThe radxa SBC has gen3 X4 ?!?!...holy hell. Would have guessed X1 Interesting
- bullen 9mo agoThe more interesting metric is running HL2 on Pi4, Pi5 and 3588: Pi4: 20 FPS same when using ffmpeg to stream to twitch. 5W Pi5: 40 FPS idem as above. 10W 3588: 300+ FPS and rock solid 60 FPS streaming to twitch. 15W So 5090 is not even interesting for gameplay. More polygons and larger textures do not make games more fun to play. AAA has peaked and C++ does not even deliver interesting games any more. C#/Java are way better alternatives for modding.
- joshu 9mo agothe rockchip hw is really exciting lately, in general. i am using a bunch of them for streaming.
- brcmthrowaway 9mo agoAren't they GPL violators?
- theodric 9mo agoSeems that way, but if you want hardware, you have to buy the hardware that exists.
- belabartok39 9mo agoI know this is just a joke. However, I think it's fairly obvious that the CPU would be the main bottleneck for every test. Still fun to measure things.
- 8cvor6j844qw_d6 9mo agoIs Raspberry Pi 5 16 GB the best one can get right now for tinkering?
- geerlingguy 9mo agoBest if you need the RAM and are willing to pay, but it doesn't make as much sense as a mini PC for the same purpose (cost-wise), if you're doing normal computing tasks. I think the sweet spot for the Pi 5 is 4GB (cost vs functionality you can use it for). But if you're like me, you don't care about value quite as much as fun/exploration. And for that, the more RAM, the merrier...
- theden 9mo agoWay back when I was young and broke, I played through Half Life 2 and the episodes on a ThinkPad T420 using an ExpressCard/34 PCMCIA to PCI with a graphics card I borrowed and an old crappy PSU I pulled from a business Dell desktop. Managed to complete the games with decent graphics and framerate at the time. It wasn't an ideal setup, but I didn't care. In fact, I thought it was a cool hack to play games at the time without forking out a lot of money to build a gaming PC. Maybe there are probably better options now to game than attaching a dedicated GPU with whatever hardware you already have, but I can verify that external GPUs are really cool and useful (though a 5090 is definitely not needed). You also don't have to care about cooling the GPU, since it's "atmosphere" cooled (though headphones and/or ANC are a must).
- sznio 9mo agoI tried a similar setup when in college, albeit with a X230 and a 1050Ti, and it worked amazing... for a few minutes at a time, since it blue-screened often. I never managed to figure out the issue. The BSOD was something about a gpu timeout. It worked perfectly at home but shat the bed at the dorm. I assume there was some nasty interference there.
- leetbulb 9mo agoNice article and some interesting hints. Also, I enjoy your writing style.
- heraldgeezer 9mo agoCPU is more limiting when gaming than people think. If you have an older one.
- KurSix 9mo agoOverall, this feels less like "can you game on a Pi" and more like a practical stress test of today's ARM Linux gaming stack
- broken-kebab 9mo agoThe last days truly has come! The world is upside down, and I'm seeing people inserting their computers into their GPUs.
- QuiEgo 9mo agoIf the CPU is the bottleneck, an interesting metric would be how cheap of a GPU you can pair and still add value. I suspect you would have similar benchmarks with a 5060 as a 5090 in these tests. For example, if you pair an N150 mini pc with a cheap AMD egpu (one of the laptop skus), you’ve made yourself tho equivalent of a gaming laptop in clamshell (with better cooling) on the cheap. A price vs fps curve, switching GPUs but keeping the mini pc as a constant, would be super interesting.
- hofen 9mo agoHo
- thisisidiotic 9mo agoThis type of thing is my next gaming build. Not using a Pi to do it, I'll be using an x86 LattePanda running Steam OS or a custom linux build, but this looks like the future of gaming to me.