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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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

> 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.

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).

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.

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 :)

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

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

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.

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.

Ho

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

Interesting

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

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

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.