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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?

#171

Post by my123 »

m132 wrote: post #169
my123 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> HCR_EL2.HCD That's not ideal because of: > Any resulting exception is taken to the Exception level at which the HVC instruction is executed. instead of trapping to the hypervisor > I've looked at how different hypervisors/VMMs handle this and, if this makes that patch set any less hacky, Virtualization.framework, QNX Hypervisor, and (I think) VMware all decode and emulate those instructions in software. Virtualizat…

> instead of trapping to the hypervisor My bad! I mean, ehh, I guess you could maintain a breakpoint in the guest kernel's exception vector table or have QEMU inject its own "zero-level exception handler" whose only purpose would be to capture those HVCs, but that's not as straightforward as I originally thought. And since those PAC calls are expected to set a few Apple-specific registers anyway, using the entitlemen…

Not much public yet about VRE virtualisation (which includes SEP) at this point.

> whose only purpose would be to capture those HVCs

quite expensive because you get to trap ~ all EL0 -> EL1 priv transitions through the virtualisation infrastructure as the sync handler has a lot going through it

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

#172

Post by m132 »

my123 wrote: post #171
m132 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> instead of trapping to the hypervisor My bad! I mean, ehh, I guess you could maintain a breakpoint in the guest kernel's exception vector table or have QEMU inject its own "zero-level exception handler" whose only purpose would be to capture those HVCs, but that's not as straightforward as I originally thought. And since those PAC calls are expected to set a few Apple-specific registers anyway, using the entitlemen…

Not much public yet about VRE virtualisation (which includes SEP) at this point. > whose only purpose would be to capture those HVCs quite expensive because you get to trap ~ all EL0 -> EL1 priv transitions through the virtualisation infrastructure as the sync handler has a lot going through it

Only if you used a breakpoint or something similar. I believe a "shadow" exception vector like that can run entirely in the guest context with the guest not even being aware of this (MRS is generally always trapped so you can return the address of the real one while still taking exceptions to the injected one).

Figuring out where to put it and how to keep it mapped is another problem, though!

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

#173

Post by burnte »

mercutio2 wrote: post #143
runjake wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was some bad history between Apple and Nvidia. Perhaps with a new generation of leadership at Apple things might change. https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/1hmgmuf/apples_hi...

I wasn't in the room when it happened, but this is very different than the story told internally about why Apple became allergic to Nvidia. Arguably more petty. SJ has been dead for almost 15 year now, I imagine the C-suite might get over it at some point.

> I imagine the C-suite might get over it at some point.

Not at Apple. They have a looooooong institutional memory that's passed down. They're still pissed at Gizmodo. I'm shocked they made a deal with Intel. I think if it hadn't been for the global political uncertainty right now they would not have signed that fab deal with Intel.

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

#175

Post by fgfarben »

bigyabai wrote: post #168
fgfarben wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please show me on the 2016-era $400 Pascal GPU where you can install the 256 GB of VRAM.

We're quite lucky that Nvidia didn't ship a 256gb system at sub-500gb/s transfer rate, is my point.

> Nvidia didn't ship a 256gb system at sub-500gb/s transfer rate

DGX Spark has 128 GB and only 273 GB/s BW. Are we lucky that NVIDIA did ship something even worse than what you specified? I'm confused.

People have been complaining [1] about how little VRAM NVIDIA ships with their GPUs for decades. Their whole game has been "oh, you want more VRAM? Buy more or pay us 50x for server grade with 10x as much VRAM. The more you buy, the more you save."

Apple did everyone a solid by shipping something way out of that distribution. We now know more than we did before! We know that a 284B parameter model with 13B active params (or 35B with 3B active, or 671B with 37B active) can outperform a 2T model and draw a fraction as much power. How can you think that's a bad thing?

You could point out that Apple didn't invent the idea of MoE. Everyone knows that. But other than Macs, there simply were no machines with >100GB VRAM directly coupled to ~50 TFLOP/s of compute until the DGX Spark last Dec. If you wanted to run a model with more than 32 GB of weights, you had to either pay up for dozens of GPUs idling at hundreds of watts or really pay up for some $50,000 server GPUs idling at... also 100-200W each.

I feel lucky to have a $3k machine on my shelf that can run DS4-Flash with 1M context at 20t/s while drawing ~150W and making very little noise. The best part? It idles at 30W with DS4 loaded, dropping to 6W after a reboot. There isn't a single GPU on the market that can match that in the same shoebox volume.

[1] https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRlOW0N...

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

#176

Post by astrange »

bigyabai wrote: post #152
lenerdenator wrote: post #108

The lack of native games on Apple Silicon is one of the greatest crimes ever committed against computing. I got Fallout 3 working on my M2 MBP as well as it did on Windows back in the day. Temps were cool, battery was decent. If they sold my college years gaming collection (15-ish years ago) in a way that ran natively through GoG or Steam, I'd buy every single title .

Porting games natively to macOS is a waste of developer time. Apple has already depreciated vast swathes of 32-bit games that were never updated to support 64-bit x86 or Apple Silicon. Developers that give macOS the same level of attention as Windows don't get the same level of support that Microsoft offers in return. Not to mention that Mac owners are a minority share of the PC gaming market. Linux has the right ide…

> Apple has already depreciated vast swathes of 32-bit games that were never updated to support 64-bit x86 or Apple Silicon.

They had literally 15 years of warning about this.

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

#177

Post by zer0zzz »

ActorNightly wrote: post #142
zer0zzz wrote: post #51

Once egpus work on Apple Silicon there will be little reason to own a pc

Man, Apple fans are still proving the stereotype to be accurate after 20 years. Ignoring the fact that the Mac OS gets in your way every time you try to do something that Apple doesn't like, with no guarantee that an update won't break anything existing, ignoring the fact that Macs are non repairable, non upgradable, ignoring the fact that they don't support multiple displays flawlessly, I hope you realize that egpu…

> Man, Apple fans are still proving the stereotype to be accurate after 20 years.

Who is this straw man you're flogging?

> Ignoring the fact that the Mac OS gets in your way every time you try to do something that Apple doesn't like, with no guarantee that an update won't break anything existing, ignoring the fact that Macs are non repairable, non upgradable, ignoring the fact that they don't support multiple displays flawlessly,

Lot to unpack there, most of it does not matter to most normies. When I bought my current mini-pc to drive my egpu I didn't focus on any of this stuff. Just about all I looked for was something that can drive a gpu over TB4/5 and has good perf/watt in a small form factor.

> I hope you realize that egpu support natively is NEVER coming to Macs, because why the fuck would they enable it when they can just charge you full price for a desktop computer?

Sounds like you are more hopeful they wont than I am that they will. They've already enabled RDMA over TB5 for ML applications, and they've left their boot loader open enough for the asahi community to reverse engineer tons of functionality.

I do think eventually there will be some form of GPGPU programing popularized on the mac that isn't Metal (gross).

> Apple is built on the sole image that Apple users have money, so buying another Mac Mini or Mac Pro in addition to your laptop is what you are supposed to do.

I think you have a very specific use case in mind, chiefly gaming. There's a lot more eGPUs offer, and it has nothing to do with turning your normie laptop into a sick gaming rig.

> Android is way ahead of Mac with Android Desktop mode and Samsung Dex, to the point where you don't even need to own a laptop anymore. Ive been using my S24/S25 with lapdock for over 3 years now as a laptop, and it works flawlessly. Apple can easily do this with iPhone, but they won't because that means one less macbook purchase.

I fail to see how Android is relevant in this context at all? For one, the arm64 hardware would have to exceed the single thread and perf per watt of an M5 and secondly you'd actually need tools and applications worth using for desktop use.

I am seeing some of the newer AMD 370/395 and Intel Ultra 7/9 socs as being much more of a serious alternative to the M4/5 here. In fact my current eGPU setup is an Ultra 9 mini-pc with an egpu, its just a shame im still on x86.

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

#178

Post by zer0zzz »

lowbloodsugar wrote: post #85
zer0zzz wrote: post #51

Once egpus work on Apple Silicon there will be little reason to own a pc

Just built a workstation with an older Threadripper Pro. It has 128 PCIE lanes, for 7 16-lane PCIE slots. An egpu has 4. I have one GPU, at x16, and I can add more. Most people don't need that, but most people don't need an eGPU either. The number of gamers who would switch to Macbook+eGPU is negligible. It's just not compelling. For LLMs, hanging a 5090 off the thunderbolt port makes prompt processing fast, but I wi…

FWIW, I am partial to eGPUs not for laptop gaming but for space. I want to write cuda kernels at home but I dont want a big tower. I have a Minisforum mini-pc the size of an M4 Mac Mini attached to one of those egpu enclosures and the whole setup was pretty easy and sits on my desk nicely.

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

#179

Post by zer0zzz »

jaimex2 wrote: post #147
zer0zzz wrote: post #51

Once egpus work on Apple Silicon there will be little reason to own a pc

The only thing Apple silicon has going for it is power use and that gap is getting closed. I can't really see any reason why I would switch to Mac, it just seems like you pay a lot more for a closed expensive environment that fights you at every step. I'll never pay anyone for a developer licence or fee either. They can sponsor me to port my software to their platform.

Is it? I recently paid $999 for a pre-build intel mini-pc system thats best case in line in perf with a M2 from four years ago. That seems roughly the same as what I'd paid for an equivalent mac mini in the past, and I thought prices for custom builds were going up quite a bit too?

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

#180

Post by zer0zzz »

_blk wrote: post #70
zer0zzz wrote: post #51

Once egpus work on Apple Silicon there will be little reason to own a pc

I assume your reasons are different to mine so for your reasons it might very well be true. But for my reasons definitely not as long as Apple Silicon can't run Linux somewhat decently natively - and even then, it's still an Apple..

Depends. I put it on an M1, and that soc is quite good at running linux.
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