[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 : 272 points
Date : 2026-01-09 19:33 UTC (1 days 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
| reactordev wrote:
| Whatever, 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 wrote:
| Glide 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 wrote:
| lol, 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 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.
| kergonath wrote:
| > 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
| 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...
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| Flashbacks of gaming on an XP-era HP Pavilion with graphics
| so bad water didn't even render in Halo 1 PC flood my mind.
|
| Countless kids played Morrowind below par spec on family
| computers all across America.
| kergonath wrote:
| > Single-digit FPS can _absolutely_ be playable if you're a
| desperate enough ten-year-old...
|
| I have fond memories of playing Diablo II at 16 fps on an old
| (even at the time) PowerMac. I am not sure I could do it now.
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| >Single-digit FPS can _absolutely_ be playable if you're a
| desperate enough ten-year-old...
|
| And somehow, more mesmerizing than games feels like playing
| now. To be a kid again.
| morshu9001 wrote:
| I've only ever played Skyrim on a 2009 13" MacBook Pro in
| Wine. It took like 30min to load and ran at like 4fps. But I
| didn't play past the first area.
|
| Wasn't AoE1 released for PPC Mac natively? AoE2 was probably
| the best Mac game ever.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| 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.
| kergonath wrote:
| > 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 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.
| nomel wrote:
| > 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
| samlinnfer wrote:
| Your 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.
| rcxdude wrote:
| Unless they want to keep going without needing to swap
| things out frequently and deal with the extremely poor
| support that most alternatives get.
| arendtio wrote:
| Thanks for the video. I just bought a RPI5 and was curious
| if this was a mistake, but after watching the whole 'I love
| PI' video, I am still okay with my choice.
|
| It is good to know that there are other boards with better
| multi-thread performance and AI capabilities. However,
| there are also a few things I disagree with in the test
| setup, such as rating only multithread performance and
| giving the best single-thread performance the lowest
| overall rating. In addition, concluding the AI tests
| without the extension board for the RPI5 seems a bit weird.
|
| So thank you for the video, but I think it depends on what
| you are trying to achieve and it is not a simple there you
| get more bang for your buck.
| SecretDreams wrote:
| > You're paying a premium for physical compatibility with a
| ton of niche accessories.
|
| Maybe this is the new narrative, but it wasn't how the Pi was
| initially developed and marketed.
|
| It's just a touch too expensive for the use cases many
| hobbiest have.
| 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
|
| - 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)
| milesvp wrote:
| > PCIe through very fragile ribbon cable
|
| We had a problem trying to bring up a couple of Pi 5, hoping
| they'd represent something reproducable we could deploy on
| multiple sites as an isolation stage for remote firmware
| programming. Everything looked great, until we brought one
| somewhere and untethered it from ethernet, and we started
| getting bizarre hangs. Turned out the wifi was close enough
| to the PCIe ribbon cable that bursts of wifi broadcasts were
| enough to disrupt the signal to the SSD, and essentially
| unmount it (taking root with it). Luckily we were able to
| find better shielded cables, but it's not something we were
| expecting to have to deal with.
| nomel wrote:
| I never really understood how GPIO is a killer feature with
| them. There are _so_ many ways to get GPIO, from $5 USB
| dongles to any microcontroller /dev board that's ever exists.
| What's special about Raspberry Pi GPIO that I'm missing?
|
| The only case I can think of is very heavy compute that
| relies on low latency GPIO related to that compute?
| robinsonb5 wrote:
| The low latency is the reason why the PiStorm (Amiga CPU
| accelerator) project works so well on a Pi 2, 3 or 4. (Pi 5
| is no longer suitable since the GPIO is now the other side
| of a PCI-E bus and thus suffers significantly higher
| latency than on previous models, despite being much faster
| in terms of throughput.)
| hypercube33 wrote:
| In general the best part of the Pi is that it's so stable
| as a platform. Everyone has the same hardware and generally
| the same OS so guides online just work - it may be one of
| the if not the best Linux on the desktop experience I've
| used personally.
|
| Along with that the gpio is there and ample so it's
| extremely easy to just start using it.
|
| I do argue an esp 8266 or esp32 are better for a
| development microcontroller but you have to muck with
| cabling it up before you can even load a program on it
| which is a few more extra steps than a Pi
| regularfry wrote:
| If it's a funky esp board, possibly. The esp8266 and
| esp32 boards I've used all have usb sockets for
| programming.
| hereonout2 wrote:
| I dunno, I brought a pi 500+ with an SSD, 16GB RAM, little
| screen, PSU, mouse and cables. It was around PS300.
|
| It's not super powerful but my young kids use it to surf the
| net, play Minecraft, do art projects, etc. (we are yet to
| play with the gpio).
|
| I don't get on with the keyboard but otherwise would make a
| decent development machine for me, considering my development
| starts with me ssh'ing into some remote VM and running vim.
|
| The whole lot is tiny and extremely portable, we pack it away
| in a draw when not in use.
|
| All in it felt like good value for money for something that
| took about 3 minutes to get up and running.
| WithinReason wrote:
| You can get much more powerful PCs for much less, e.g.:
|
| https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CFPRDQY8/
| hereonout2 wrote:
| That's actually about the same price as the pi 500+
| without the screen. Except that one has 500gb Vs 256gb
| SSD, but doesn't have the snazzy led keyboard.
|
| Processor comparison too
|
| https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-
| raspberry_pi_5_b_b...
| Aurornis wrote:
| > 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.
| pharrington wrote:
| You think an RTX 5090 only costs $2000??
| bityard wrote:
| 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.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Small yes, efficient no. It's more or less on par with
| comparable minipcs in power draw, needs an active cooler and
| idles at over 3W. That's more than a Pi 2 uses going flat
| out. They keep increasing power draw with marginal efficiency
| gains and don't bother to do much power management. It's
| absolutely atrocious compared to the average smartphone SoC.
|
| I really hope there's some kind of battery oriented low
| wattage high efficiency version planned someday, because
| we're up to requiring a 5A power supply and it's getting
| absurd.
| KurSix wrote:
| I think the Pi still makes sense when you actually want a Pi
| 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
| ValdikSS wrote:
| And sometimes quite faster:
| https://printserver.ink/blog/box64-vs-fex/
| tryauuum wrote:
| 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
| 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.
| wincy wrote:
| Right, I'm pointing out that as a purely single player game,
| how would one cheat in Doom: The Dark Ages?
| cmxch wrote:
| Denuvo is malware, not anticheat.
| bigyabai wrote:
| Malware is always a matter of perspective.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Most anti-cheat solutions these days are literal rootkits. So
| that distinction is pretty blurry lately.
| 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.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| There 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-
| bi...
| scottjg wrote:
| a great post that definitely inspired this one. i link to
| it in the first paragraph of my blog post.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| I 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.
| scottjg wrote:
| we can only hope
| shmeeed wrote:
| I appreciate you making the post not about AI.
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| 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)
| ollien wrote:
| I'm not very familiar with this layer of things; what does it
| mean for a GPU to drive a boot sequence? Is there something
| massively parallel that is well suited for the GPU?
| baby_souffle wrote:
| > what does it mean for a GPU to drive a boot sequence
|
| It's a quirk of the broadcom chips that the rpi family
| uses; the GPU is the first bit of silicon to power up and
| do things. The GPU specifically is a bit unusual, but the
| general idea of "smaller thing does initial bring up, then
| powers up $main_cpu" is not unusual once $main_cpu is ~
| powerful enough to run linux.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| That's interesting, particularly since as far as I can
| tell, nothing in userland really bothers to make use of
| its GPU. I would really like to understand why, since I
| have a whole bunch of Pi's and it seems like their GPUs
| can't be used for much of anything (not really much for
| transcoding nor for AI).
| kcb wrote:
| The Raspberry Pi GPU has one of the better open source
| GPU drivers as far as SBCs go. It's limited in
| performance but its definitely being used for rendering.
| bitwize wrote:
| You can play Quake on 'em.
| codeflo wrote:
| > their GPUs can't be used for much of anything (not
| really much for transcoding nor for AI)
|
| It's both funny and sad to me that we're at the point
| where someone would (perhaps even reasonably) describe
| using the GPU only for the "G" in its name as not "much
| of anything".
| regularfry wrote:
| There is a Vulkan API, they can run _some_ compute. At
| least the 4 and 5 can: https://github.com/jdonald/vulkan-
| compute-rpi . No idea if it's worth the bus latency
| though. I'd love to know the answer to that.
|
| I'd also love to see the same done on the Zero 2, where
| the CPU is far less beefy and the trade-off might go a
| different way. It's an older generation of GPU though so
| the same code won't work.
| ryandrake wrote:
| One (obscure) example I know of is the RTLSDR-Airband[1]
| project uses the GPU to do FFT computation on older, less
| powerful Pis, through the GPU_FFT library[2].
|
| 1: https://github.com/rtl-airband/RTLSDR-Airband
|
| 2: http://www.aholme.co.uk/GPU_FFT/Main.htm
| peterderivaz wrote:
| The Raspberry Pi contains a Videocore processor (I wrote
| the original instruction set coding and assembler and
| simulator for this processor).
|
| This is a general purpose processor which includes 16 way
| SIMD instructions that can access data in a 64 by 64 byte
| register file as either rows or columns (and as either 8 or
| 16 or 32 bit data).
|
| It also has superscalar instructions which access a
| separate set of 32-bit registers, but is tightly integrated
| with the SIMD instructions (like in ARM Neon cores or x86
| AVX instructions).
|
| This is what boots up originally.
|
| Videocore was designed to be good at the actions needed for
| video codecs (e.g. motion estimation and DCTs).
|
| I did write a 3d library that could render textured
| triangles using the SIMD instructions on this processor.
| This was enough to render simple graphics and I wrote a
| demo that rendered Tomb Raider levels, but only for a small
| frame resolution.
|
| The main application was video codecs, so for the original
| Apple Video iPod I wrote the MPEG4 and h264 decoding
| software using the Videocore processor, which could run at
| around QVGA resolution.
|
| However, in later versions of the chip we wanted more video
| and graphics performance. I designed the hardware to
| accelerate video, while another team (including Eben) wrote
| the hardware to accelerate 3d graphics.
|
| So in Raspberry Pis, there is both a Videocore processor
| (which boots up and handles some tasks), and a separate GPU
| (which handles 3d graphics, but not booting up).
|
| It is possible to write code that runs on the Videocore
| processor - on older Pis I accelerated some video decode
| sofware codecs by using both the GPU and the Videocore to
| offload bits of transform and deblocking and motion
| compensation, but on later Pis there is dedicated video
| decode hardware to do this instead.
|
| Note that the ARMs on the later Pis are much faster and
| more capable than before, while the Videocore processor has
| not been developed, so there is not really much use for the
| Videocore anymore. However, the separate GPU has been
| developed more and is quite capable.
| jacquesm wrote:
| You have the most interesting job!
|
| Thank you, I've used your work quite a number of times
| now.
| KurSix wrote:
| This experiment really does feel like a poetic inversion
| KurSix wrote:
| 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
| Havoc wrote:
| The radxa SBC has gen3 X4 ?!?!...holy hell. Would have guessed X1
|
| Interesting
| bullen wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| the rockchip hw is really exciting lately, in general. i am
| using a bunch of them for streaming.
| brcmthrowaway wrote:
| Aren't they GPL violators?
| theodric wrote:
| Seems that way, but if you want hardware, you have to buy
| the hardware that exists.
| belabartok39 wrote:
| 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.
| 8cvor6j844qw_d6 wrote:
| Is Raspberry Pi 5 16 GB the best one can get right now for
| tinkering?
| geerlingguy wrote:
| 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...
| theden wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| leetbulb wrote:
| Nice article and some interesting hints. Also, I enjoy your
| writing style.
| heraldgeezer wrote:
| CPU is more limiting when gaming than people think. If you have
| an older one.
| KurSix wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| The last days truly has come! The world is upside down, and I'm
| seeing people inserting their computers into their GPUs.
| QuiEgo wrote:
| 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.
| hofen wrote:
| Ho
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