[HN Gopher] RTX 5090 and Raspberry Pi: Can It Game?
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RTX 5090 and Raspberry Pi: Can It Game?
Author : scottjg
Score : 78 points
Date : 2026-01-09 19:33 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (scottjg.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (scottjg.com)
| rcarmo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| :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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| you're lucky you didn't get stuck with an S3 ViRGE.
| whaleofatw2022 wrote:
| Haha 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 wrote:
| Everything changed with Voodoo Banshee's
| iamtheworstdev wrote:
| rarely has a company rested so hard on their laurels as
| 3dFX
| azalemeth wrote:
| 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...
| hparadiz wrote:
| Me trying to run Falcon 4.0 on a 166 mhz P1 with 16 mb of edo
| ram.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| When 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.
| kreig wrote:
| Single-digit FPS can _absolutely_ be playable if you're a
| desperate enough ten-year-old...
|
| Absolutely, sweet memories playing at less than 10fps using
| zsnes on a 486 dx2 by 1999...
| moffkalast wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| behnamoh wrote:
| 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
| guywithahat wrote:
| 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
| juris wrote:
| 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.
| matt3210 wrote:
| Is that a pi with a gfx card or a gfx card with a pi attached?
| observationist wrote:
| 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?
| theragra wrote:
| Sounds intriguing
| bri3d wrote:
| Congratulations, you have invented AMD Instinct, except
| without the $100 part!
| parsimo2010 wrote:
| This is very much a "would you like some coffee with all of
| your cream?" situation.
| drnick1 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
|
| 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)
| Sevii wrote:
| Very much wish I had gotten a RTX 5090 for local LLMs but it
| would have doubled the cost of my PC.
| MBCook wrote:
| Actually isn't the cost of a Pi basically a rounding error
| compared to the 5090 at this point?
| theragra wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Maybe BIOS or other firmware? No clue, but my GPU also runs
| better on Linux that Windows today.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| FEX is very impressive.
| ekianjo wrote:
| Box64 was there first
| wincy wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Denuvo is DRM, not anticheat.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Denuvo 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.
| jacquesm wrote:
| 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.
| scottjg wrote:
| 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.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Yeah 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.
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