Raspberry Pi can do 1,000,000 issues, however run a discrete graphics card it can’t… that’s, till the brand new Raspberry Pi 5 and Jeff Gerling, who’s operating an AMD Radeon RX 460 and enjoying well-liked video games like Minecraft and Portal by means of his Pi 5.
The newer Raspberry Pi 5 does not have any PCIe connectors, however it may be pressured as much as PCIe Gen3 specs (as much as 10GT/s) in comparison with the Raspberry Pi 4, which was restricted to PCIe Gen2 specs and easily did not have sufficient bandwidth to accommodate an exterior GPU.
The earlier variations of Raspberry Pi did not solely have restricted bandwidth by means of its PCIe 2.0 interface, but in addition the Broadcom BCM2711 processor had a number of PCIe-related bugs that made operating an exterior GPU virtually unattainable.
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Raspberry Pi 5 + Radeon RX 460 as exterior GPU (supply Jeff Geerling)
Raspberry Pi 5 includes a new Broadcom BCM2712 processor which Jeff mentioned “appears to have mounted the PCIe bus quirks” that plagued the previous-gen Pi 4. The exterior GPU capabilities on Pi 5 are a lot better, with Jeff explaining: “Exterior GPU bringup on the Pi 5 was a lot sooner since we now know most of the driver quirks are because of outdated code assuming an X86 structure“.
5One of many largest issues of observe is that the Raspberry Pi 5 does not have a daily PCIe connector, so using adapters will come into play. A customized board is required, which is able to instantly hook up with the Pi 5 board by means of the FPC connector, and because the PI 5 has its personal energy supply, you may want to make use of an ATX energy provide to fireplace up the PCIe adapter, and any included discrete graphics card. You possibly can’t simply throw in a GeForce RTX 4090, after all, whereas Jeff utilizing an AMD Radeon RX 460 graphics card which is powered by the Polaris 11 GPU and got here out in 2016.
So you have solely obtained 2GB or 4GB of VRAM relying on the SKU of RX 460 you buy, so there goes enjoying Alan Wake 2 at 4K 120FPS, I assume.
Jeff notes:
- The utmost PCIe Gen 2.0 bandwidth meant use instances have been restricted to ‘processing on GPU’ duties like GPU-assisted compute. Even within the base case, exterior playing cards could not essentially pipe by means of knowledge fast sufficient for modest gaming or different real-time duties.
- (And most impactful) The BCM2711 SoC used on the CM4 and Pi 4 had some unusual PCI Categorical bus quirks that brought about exhausting crashes and numerous faults in drivers making an attempt to make use of 64-bit reminiscence addresses. There have been unusual and unique workarounds-but these workarounds led to much more restricted efficiency!
