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RTX 5090 and M4 MacBook Air: Can It Game?

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Re: RTX 5090 and M4 MacBook Air: Can It Game?

#41

Post by funimpoded »

mywittyname wrote: post #16

> As much as I hate to admit it, step one in most of my projects now is to ask AI about it. Maybe it’ll tell me something I don’t know. Or, more likely, it will tell you something it doesn't know. Reminds me of yesterday, when I was arguing with ChatGPT that the 5070TI was an actual video card. It kept trying to correct me by saying I must have meant a 4070ti, since no such 5070ti card exists.

Watching the entire economy of a superpower and ~all of online culture go absolutely ga-ga over Furbys has been one of the weirdest things I've ever witnessed.

Re: RTX 5090 and M4 MacBook Air: Can It Game?

#42

Post by bryceacc »

ericmay wrote: post #39
collabs wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, it will acknowledge that it made a mistake and continue to make the same mistake again. I asked Claude to generate an HTML page about PowerShell 7. It gave me a page saying 7.4 was the latest LTS release. I corrected it with links showing 7.6 was released in March and asked it to regenerate with the latest information. It generated basically the same page with the same claim that 7.4 was the latest release.

> Or, it will acknowledge that it made a mistake and continue to make the same mistake again. People do this too though. At least the AI generally tries to follow instructions that you give it even when you are lacking clarity in the details. I feel like it's similar to the self-driving car problem. The car could have 99.9999% reliability, drive much better and safer than a human, yet folks will still freak out about…

>I corrected it with links

it should be reasonably expected that you can give a source and fix an error in the AI output.

I would even go as far as to say if a human directly told the AI "no, use 7.6 as the latest version", the AI should absolutely follow direct instructions no matter what it thinks is true. What if this human was working on a slide about the upcoming release of 7.6 that has no public documentation?

Re: RTX 5090 and M4 MacBook Air: Can It Game?

#43

Post by Aurornis »

Excellent article.

The game benchmarks are fun but the LLM improvements are where this gets really interesting for practical use. I love Apple platforms as an approachable way to run local models with a lot of RAM, but their relatively slow prompt processing speed is often overlooked.

> Here you can see the big issue with Macs: the prompt processing (aka “prefill”) speed. It just gets worse and worse, the longer the prompt gets. At a 4K-token prompt, which doesn’t seem very long, it takes 17 seconds for the M4 MacBook Air to parse before we even start generating a response. Meanwhile, if you strap the eGPU to it, it’ll only take 150ms. It’s 120x faster.

The prefill problem goes unnoticed when you’re playing around with the LLM with small chats. When you start trying to use it for bigger work pieces the compute limit becomes a bottleneck.

The time to first token (TTFT) charts don’t look bad until you notice that they had to be shown on a logarithmic scale because the Mac platforms were so much slower than full GPU compute.

Re: RTX 5090 and M4 MacBook Air: Can It Game?

#44

Post by Aurornis »

brcmthrowaway wrote: post #37
matthewfcarlson wrote: post #19

I have been bothering the VM team for years for VM GPU pass through. I worked on the Apple Silicon Mac Pro and it would have made way more sense if you could run a linux VM and pass through the GPU that goes inside the case! Sadly, as you can tell, they have not taken me up on my requests. Awesome that other people got it working!

I still believe the lack of NVIDIA GPU support in the Mac Pro will go down as one of the greatest missed opportunities in tech. Anyway, the Mac Pro is dead now. There's only so much sales audio and video professionals can provide.

> I still believe the lack of NVIDIA GPU support in the Mac Pro will go down as one of the greatest missed opportunities in tech.

I don’t know about that. Apple supported some full size GPUs in past product lines and the number of users was very small. Granted, LLMs change that demand but the audience for Mac Pro buyers who would use a full-size GPU that is impossible to obtain is almost nothing compared to their laptop sales.

Re: RTX 5090 and M4 MacBook Air: Can It Game?

#45

Post by asats »

mywittyname wrote: post #34
simonh wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s training data only goes up to late 2024 or early 2025 so that might be why, though it does have access to the internet.

Yeah, the solution was to link it to the nvidia page of the card, then it was like, 'oh, okay.' But at that point, I lost faith in it's ability to provide me with the information I was looking for. If it's information is so out of date that it doesn't know about the 5000 series, how could I be confident that it knew the details I was asking about (game engine related research)?

Are you using the instant model?

Re: RTX 5090 and M4 MacBook Air: Can It Game?

#46

Post by jbverschoor »

brcmthrowaway wrote: post #37
matthewfcarlson wrote: post #19

I have been bothering the VM team for years for VM GPU pass through. I worked on the Apple Silicon Mac Pro and it would have made way more sense if you could run a linux VM and pass through the GPU that goes inside the case! Sadly, as you can tell, they have not taken me up on my requests. Awesome that other people got it working!

I still believe the lack of NVIDIA GPU support in the Mac Pro will go down as one of the greatest missed opportunities in tech. Anyway, the Mac Pro is dead now. There's only so much sales audio and video professionals can provide.

I guess that little problem with the Nvidia chips overheating in the MacBook Pro didn’t give Apple a lot of confidence

Re: RTX 5090 and M4 MacBook Air: Can It Game?

#47

Post by bigyabai »

Aurornis wrote: post #44
brcmthrowaway wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still believe the lack of NVIDIA GPU support in the Mac Pro will go down as one of the greatest missed opportunities in tech. Anyway, the Mac Pro is dead now. There's only so much sales audio and video professionals can provide.

> I still believe the lack of NVIDIA GPU support in the Mac Pro will go down as one of the greatest missed opportunities in tech. I don’t know about that. Apple supported some full size GPUs in past product lines and the number of users was very small. Granted, LLMs change that demand but the audience for Mac Pro buyers who would use a full-size GPU that is impossible to obtain is almost nothing compared to their lap…

The audience for Mac Pro buyers is almost nothing, full stop. It failed to find a niche, and now Apple is getting rid of it: https://www.macrumors.com/2026/03/26/apple-discontinues-mac-...

Part of the reason the new Mac Pro failed to find an audience can definitely be blamed on macOS' hostility to third party hardware. Who knows what Apple would be worth if they beat Nvidia's Grace CPU to the datacenter market. It was certainly their opportunity.

Re: RTX 5090 and M4 MacBook Air: Can It Game?

#48

Post by superlopuh »

Aurornis wrote: post #43

Excellent article. The game benchmarks are fun but the LLM improvements are where this gets really interesting for practical use. I love Apple platforms as an approachable way to run local models with a lot of RAM, but their relatively slow prompt processing speed is often overlooked. > Here you can see the big issue with Macs: the prompt processing (aka “prefill”) speed. It just gets worse and worse, the longer the…

I'm curious and not an expert here, do you know why the TTFT is so much worse on Mac? To elaborate, the article just says that this step is compute bound, but I'm wondering whether it is just that simple or if it might also be less optimised in MLX?

Re: RTX 5090 and M4 MacBook Air: Can It Game?

#49

Post by linkregister »

nothinkjustai wrote: post #22

> As much as I hate to admit it, step one in most of my projects now is to ask AI about it. Maybe it’ll tell me something I don’t know. It’s these people, not the ones who refuse to use LLMs, who are as they say, “cooked”.

The author of the blog is not cooked; they're raw. Their inventive, multi-chain setup was tuff. Their PCI passthrough and qemu patches were straight fire. Unless you can point to something you've done this impressive, you're just an unc bro.

Re: RTX 5090 and M4 MacBook Air: Can It Game?

#50

Post by m132 »

matthewfcarlson wrote: post #19

I have been bothering the VM team for years for VM GPU pass through. I worked on the Apple Silicon Mac Pro and it would have made way more sense if you could run a linux VM and pass through the GPU that goes inside the case! Sadly, as you can tell, they have not taken me up on my requests. Awesome that other people got it working!

It looks like the pass through part here was implemented using standard DriverKit interfaces, if I'm not mistaken. That is, the PCIe BAR can already be mapped from the user-space, without any extra modifications to macOS. It's just a matter of VMMs, such as QEMU, adopting this interface in addition to Linux VFIO and the like (unless you're talking about Virtualization.framework, which is kind of a VMM of its own).

What exactly do you feel macOS is missing?

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