RTX 5090 and Raspberry Pi: Can it game?

[jacquesm]

This 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.

[AceJohnny2]

it's extra funny to me because the Raspberry Pi SoC is basically a little CPU riding on a big GPU (well, the earlier ones were. Maybe the latest ones shift the balance of power a bit). In fact, to this day the GPU is still the one driving the boot sequence.

So plugging a RasPi into a 5090 is "just" swapping the horse for one 10,000x bigger (someone correct my ratio of the RasPi5 GPU to the RTX5090)

[scottjg]

i 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.

[KurSix]

Seeing real games and benchmarks makes it more than a party trick, even if the use cases are niche. The serious takes kind of miss that the point is to poke the stack and see where it breaks

[drnick1]

I 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.

[hamdingers]

You'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.

[alnwlsn]

It would make a lousy desktop computer even if it was 10x as powerful.

- high current 5V USB power supply you probably don't have

- HDMI micro port you have like 1 cable for

- PCIe through very fragile ribbon cable + hodgepodge of adapters

- more adapters needed for SSD

- no case, but needs ample airflow

- power input is on the side and sticks out

GPIO is the killer feature, but I'll be honest, 99% of the hardware hacking I do is with microcontrollers much cheaper than a Pi that provide a serial port over USB anyways (and the commonly-confused-for-a-full-pi Pi Pico is pretty great for this)

[bityard]

For desktop use cases, sure. But the Pi's target market is makers and educators who want small and efficient and can interface easily with peripherals like cameras and GPIO. Desktop users and low-end home labbers are a distant second.

[Aurornis]

> I think the conclusion here is that Raspberry Pis are now too pricey

This blog post shows a $2000 GPU attached to a slow SBC that costs less than 1/10th of the GPU.

It’s interesting. It’s entertaining. It’s a fun read. But it’s not a serious setup that anyone considers optimal.

[KurSix]

I think the Pi still makes sense when you actually want a Pi

[wincy]

I 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

[Onawa]

Denuvo is DRM, not anticheat.

[cmxch]

Denuvo is malware, not anticheat.

[xattt]

> 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.

[azalemeth]

I'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...

[scottjg]

you're lucky you didn't get stuck with an S3 ViRGE.

[geerlingguy]

There's more comparisons with various Arm hardware and Cyberpunk 2077 over here: 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]

That 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

[NelsonMinar]

I 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]

FEX is very impressive.

[tryauuum]

eGPU 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

[moffkalast]

Huh 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]

One 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

[theragra]

I 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]

Maybe BIOS or other firmware? No clue, but my GPU also runs better on Linux that Windows today.

[bullen]

The 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]

the rockchip hw is really exciting lately, in general. i am using a bunch of them for streaming.

[theden]

Way 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]

I 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.

[matt3210]

Is that a pi with a gfx card or a gfx card with a pi attached?

[observationist]

Yes.

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]

This is very much a “would you like some coffee with all of your cream?” situation.

[QuiEgo]

If 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.

[belabartok39]

I 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.

[KurSix]

Overall, 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]

The last days truly has come! The world is upside down, and I'm seeing people inserting their computers into their GPUs.

[rcarmo]

Before 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]

Man, 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]

: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.

[thisisidiotic]

This 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.

[Sevii]

Very much wish I had gotten a RTX 5090 for local LLMs but it would have doubled the cost of my PC.

[MBCook]

Actually isn’t the cost of a Pi basically a rounding error compared to the 5090 at this point?

[heraldgeezer]

CPU is more limiting when gaming than people think. If you have an older one.

[leetbulb]

Nice article and some interesting hints. Also, I enjoy your writing style.

[8cvor6j844qw_d6]

Is Raspberry Pi 5 16 GB the best one can get right now for tinkering?

[geerlingguy]

Best 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...

[Havoc]

The radxa SBC has gen3 X4 ?!?!...holy hell. Would have guessed X1

Interesting

[hofen]

Ho

[behnamoh]

What 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

[kergonath]

> 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.

[juris]

personally 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.

[guywithahat]

Idk 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