RTX 5090 and Raspberry Pi: Can it game?

https://scottjg.com/posts/2026-01-08-crappy-computer-showdown/

by scottjg • 6 months ago

283 115 6 months ago

rcarmo• 6 months ago

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• 6 months ago

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. :(

juris2• 6 months 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• 6 months 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.

scottjg4• 6 months ago

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

whaleofatw2022• 6 months ago

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).

azalemeth• 6 months ago

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• 6 months ago

Me trying to run Falcon 4.0 on a 166 mhz P1 with 16 mb of edo ram.

squeaky-clean• 6 months ago

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• 6 months ago

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• 6 months ago

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.

kergonath3• 6 months ago

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• 6 months ago

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• 6 months ago

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.

geerlingguy4• 6 months ago

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.

KurSix5• 6 months ago

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

moffkalast2• 6 months ago

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.

bigyabai2• 6 months ago

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• 6 months ago

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• 6 months ago

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

juris2• 6 months ago

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.

kergonath3• 6 months 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• 6 months ago

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

observationist• 6 months ago

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?

theragra2• 6 months ago

Sounds intriguing

bri3d• 6 months ago

Congratulations, you have invented AMD Instinct, except without the $100 part!

parsimo2010• 6 months ago

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

drnick1• 6 months ago

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• 6 months ago

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.

nomel2• 6 months 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

SecretDreams• 6 months ago

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• 6 months ago

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• 6 months ago

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.

nomel2• 6 months ago

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?

hereonout22• 6 months ago

I dunno, I brought a pi 500+ with an SSD, 16GB RAM, little screen, PSU, mouse and cables. It was around £300.

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.

Aurornis• 6 months ago

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.

pharrington2• 6 months ago

You think an RTX 5090 only costs $2000??

bityard• 6 months ago

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.

moffkalast2• 6 months ago

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.

KurSix5• 6 months ago

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

Sevii• 6 months ago

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

MBCook• 6 months ago

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

theragra2• 6 months ago

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• 6 months ago

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

NelsonMinar• 6 months ago

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.

jacquesm3• 6 months ago

FEX is very impressive.

ekianjo2• 6 months ago

Box64 was there first

tryauuum• 6 months ago

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

wincy2• 6 months ago

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• 6 months ago

Denuvo is DRM, not anticheat.

gjsman-1000• 6 months ago

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.

wincy2• 6 months ago

Right, I’m pointing out that as a purely single player game, how would one cheat in Doom: The Dark Ages?

cmxch• 6 months ago

Denuvo is malware, not anticheat.

bigyabai2• 6 months ago

Malware is always a matter of perspective.

bigstrat2003• 6 months ago

Most anti-cheat solutions these days are literal rootkits. So that distinction is pretty blurry lately.

jacquesm3• 6 months ago

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.

scottjg4• 6 months ago

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• 6 months ago

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.

geerlingguy4• 6 months ago

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...

shmeeed• 6 months ago

I appreciate you making the post not about AI.

AceJohnny2• 6 months ago

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• 6 months ago

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?

KurSix5• 6 months ago

This experiment really does feel like a poetic inversion

KurSix5• 6 months ago

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• 6 months ago

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

Interesting

bullen• 6 months ago

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• 6 months ago

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

brcmthrowaway• 6 months ago

Aren't they GPL violators?

belabartok39• 6 months ago

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• 6 months ago

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

geerlingguy4• 6 months ago

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• 6 months ago

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• 6 months ago

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• 6 months ago

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

heraldgeezer• 6 months ago

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

KurSix5• 6 months ago

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• 6 months ago

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

QuiEgo• 6 months ago

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• 6 months ago

thisisidiotic• 6 months ago

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.

RTX 5090 and Raspberry Pi: Can it game?

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