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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?

#101

Post by dakolli »

collabs wrote: post #25
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.

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.

But people want to do their taxes with these things lmfao

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

#102

Post by dakolli »

funimpoded wrote: post #41
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.

Watching the entire economy of a superpower bet its entire future on SOTA text autocomplete models has been interesting to watch (which I think you're referring too).

Previous Empires naively bet their entire future on the words of magicians, or people who claimed they could look into water, the sky and fire and tell you what the future is going to be.

Machine Learning Engineers are the modern day Empire's court magician.

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

#104

Post by mikae1 »

m132 wrote: post #50
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). Wh…

>> This project requires a special entitlement from Apple. I’ve requested it, and heard they may be open to granting it, but I have not yet heard back, and I’m told that the wait time could be months.

> I have been bothering the VM team for years for VM GPU pass through.

Good luck. I'm sure they're keen on giving people access to this so that people can spend their money on NVIDIA GPUs instead of buying more expensive Macs. :)

Would of course be awesome, but I'd be very surprised if it happened.

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

#105

Post by bigyabai »

mathisfun123 wrote: post #53
superlopuh wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> I'm curious and not an expert here, do you know why the TTFT is so much worse on Mac? because the GPUs aren't as fantastic as everyone assumes? > might also be less optimised in MLX? prefill has gotta be one of the most optimized paths in MLX...

No you don't understand, on Apple Silicon my CPU has comparable memory bandwidth to a $400 Pascal-era GPU. With the unified memory architecture, that means my iGPU gets 2016-levels of DDR transfer speed with none of the upsides of CUDA. It's the most cutting-edge hardware ever put in a personal computer, without a doubt.

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

#106

Post by brcmthrowaway »

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…

Use oMLX. Qwen3.6 - 300tok/s PP, 30tok/s TG.

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

#107

Post by traderj0e »

zer0zzz wrote: post #51

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

Been hearing this for over a decade, except back then it was eGPU in Intel Macs which were closer to other PCs if anything. Even if this didn't require so much DIY and if Thunderbolt could do PCIe speeds, most people don't want to add drama when they can just use a PC with regular PCIe slots and native compatibility with Nvidia. The native way already has enough edge cases without adding an unusual setup.

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

#108

Post by lenerdenator »

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.

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

#109

Post by hedora »

binarycrusader wrote: post #96
hedora wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want a workstation, you are probably better off building it yourself, or having your local computer store do it. The primary exceptions are AMD strix halos or the nvidia dgx spark. I haven’t seen a non-laughable workstation config from the big vendors since the dot com bubble. Presumably they exist, I guess?

DISCLAIMER: Only speaking for myself, not employers or affiliates. I've been pretty darn happy with the Puget Systems custom workstation I ordered last year before the memory craze started (especially since it has 192GiB of DDR5). I also ordered another family member a custom "Tiki" system from Falcon Northwest and that has also been quite excellent from what I've seen and they've told me. Now is obviously not the mo…

I wouldn’t count them as a big vendor, but I’ve only heard good things. Local shops around here charge like $99 to put a machine together, install an OS and run burn in testing. You get more choice than an outfit like puget, but less carefully tested part / cooling selection, etc.

The last I checked, the really big players tended to add value add gimmicks (water cooling is a common one, custom psu form factors are another) with reliability / compatibility issues. That’s the tier to avoid, not the Puget systems of the world.

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

#110

Post by dwaite »

caycep wrote: post #60
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!

What are the chances there will be another Mac Pro in the future? Will Apple ever make a computer that makes Siracusa happy? (and do you have the "Believe" shirt?)

IMHO - extremely little.

It is too inefficient to design a machine which _might_ have two GPU and a flock of additional drives installed into it. It just makes sense to instead design around having independent hardware in its own case, which can meet its own power/cooling needs. This has been a design goal since the trashcan Mac.

Having a PCIe bus increases bandwidth and reduces latency, but once you account for eGPU and for people who would be happy building custom solutions on platforms other than macOS, there's likely not enough identified market for a modular design.

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