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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?

#111

Post by runjake »

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.

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...

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

#112

Post by xp84 »

bigyabai wrote: post #54
jbverschoor wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The Mac Pro isn't a Macbook Pro. It has socketed PCI slots and should be able to support the user's hardware in macOS' software, regardless of how Apple feels.

Seriously, the decades-long grudge against Nvidia that we always hear about seems like the most ridiculous and immature business move. I expect that kind of thing from an individual, you know, “I NEVER fly American Airlines!!!” but in business, such a permanent ban on one of the two players in a market, the leader no less. I don’t get it.

Maybe it doesn’t matter that much now because they’ve literally exited all the businesses where an external GPU is going to matter. But sticking with AMD all that time out of spite is just wild.

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

#113

Post by Melatonic »

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.

Audio and Video professionals jumped ship around the time Apple canned all the pro software

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

#114

Post by Melatonic »

ademeure wrote: post #58
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?

Apple GPUs didn’t have tensor cores until the M5 (aka “a neural accelerator in each core”) and in the article’s charts that a M5 Pro significantly beats a M4 Max (while in other workloads it would be much smaller since Pro is ~1/2 Max). EDIT: since Aurornis beat me by 3 minutes, I’ll add another interesting tidbit instead :) NVIDIA tensor cores on consumer GPUs are massively less powerful per SM core than on their da…

Does that include stuff like the Pro Blackwell 6000? Or are the tensor cores as good per SM comparably? They perform quite well on many tests

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

#115

Post by Melatonic »

bigyabai wrote: post #99
lowbloodsugar wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The number of gamers who would switch to Macbook+eGPU is negligible. It's just not compelling. This. eGPUs fade in and out of relevance every few years, and even back in the Intel Macbook days there were people advocating for eGPU gaming with Bootcamp. It was a terrible solution, there is every reason to avoid macOS with a dGPU when you have something like Linux or even Windows as an alternative.

Thats also because we keep trying to use terrible interconnects. If we get an interconnect with a proper latency spec things might change

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

#116

Post by steelbrain »

divbzero wrote: post #26

This is pretty impressive. My impression was that eGPUs simply do not work with Apple Silicon. ( EDIT: Apple agrees with my impression. “To use an eGPU, a Mac with an Intel processor is required.” And, on top of that, the officially supported eGPUs were all AMD not NVIDIA. https://support.apple.com/en-us/102363 )

This is not using an eGPU with macOS, ie you can't run your chrome on macOS with its GPU acceleration coming from this eGPU. This is tunneling that eGPU to a Linux VM.

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

#118

Post by fluoridation »

hedora wrote: post #109
binarycrusader wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

Non-standard parts are not about value-adding, they're about cost-cutting if you're feeling charitable, and about forcing vendor lock-in if you're not.

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

#119

Post by xp84 »

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 see a lot of angry responses in your replies, but I do think you have a good point. It seems like those arguing with you are mostly vigorously opposing a strawman: the idea that AI is perfect and that trusting AI to be perfect is the right move. Only crazy people think that, though.

For me, I ask AI questions about taxes and my health all the time. In the case of taxes, getting a basic handle on the relevant tax law is made 1000 times easier. I can always refer directly to the IRS publications to verify, once I know what I’m looking for.

For health, frankly, it would be impractical for me to ever get as much useful information from doctors as what I can easily get from AI. Four years ago, I would have a bunch of health questions and simply never know the answers to any of them because I would have nobody to ask. Now I get them all answered, and if I were to be suggested to actually do anything that sounded even slightly risky I’d go to the doctor, armed with much more context than I had before, to verify it.

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

#120

Post by mh- »

asats wrote: post #45
mywittyname wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No one ever is willing to share a link to the ChatGPT or Claude session when I ask follow-up questions.
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