RTX 5090 and Raspberry Pi: Can It Game?

Summary

It turns out, you can attach an external GPU to a Raspberry Pi 5. So my natural first question is, can I game on it? Let’s try it out and compare it with some similar computers.For the showdown of crappy gaming computers, we’ll see which of these handles gaming best:CPU: 4-core Intel N150 @ 3.6GHzRAM: 16GB DDR4PCIe: M.2 Gen3 x4More powerful than the Raspberry Pi 5, but at a similar price point. It also has a potential advantage for running games, since it’s not ARM-based.In the photo, you can see the default configuration (SSD in the fast PCIe slot). For this experiment, I’ll move it into the slower (x1) slot and plug the eGPU into the faster (x4) slot.Pretty comparable to the Raspberry Pi 5 (it’s ARM), but the extra cores give it a little more horsepower. The faster PCIe slot is also included on-board. Since the PCIe slot will be taken for the GPU, we’ll just use a USB SSD for both ARM boards.This is why we’re all here. It’s the quintessential hobbyist SBC. Unfortunately it’s the most challenged: fewer cores, and significantly less PCIe bandwidth. The Pi 5’s Gen2 x1 slot provides ~500 MB/s, compared to ~4,000 MB/s on the Gen3 x4 slots of the other machines, an 8x difference.eGPU#We will be using a relatively inexpensive OCuLink dock to pair with our very expensive GPU. If you’re not familiar with the technology, it’s basically a PCIe extension cord to let you plug a graphics card into a computer that wouldn’t normally fit one. The dock is powered externally by a separate power supply.For this experiment, we’re using an NVIDIA RTX 5090 Founders Edition (32GB VRAM).The OCuLink cable plugs into an M.2 card that we’ll insert into each machine as we test it.On the Intel-based Beelink machine, from a software perspective the card is more or less indistinguishable from a normal graphics card. We can just install the normal NVIDIA drivers.The ARM-based computers we’re testing have various quirks (lack of DMA coherence, memory alignment requirements, etc.) that make them in...