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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?

#31

Post by crdrost »

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 feels like half the problem in this blog post is dealing with memory access issues induced by QEMU and the VM boundary... it's probably something dumb I'm missing, but if you boot up Ubuntu in Docker, wouldn't the NVIDIA drivers still load? And then you wouldn't have to fight Apple about the memory management because OSX would still own the memory?

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

#32

Post by delecti »

hypercube33 wrote: post #20
hparadiz wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Valve has done a ton of work here because it's required to be able to run x86 games on a Steam Frame which has an ARM cpu.

Steam deck runs a full x86-64 AMD APU. The work valve has done for that was to get Windows games to run seamlessly on Linux. Hopefully in 2026 the Valve Index VR headset which is ARM (Qualcomm?) we get what you're talking about here - basically proton for Win32/64 to Linux ARM64. Side note that Windows on ARM isn't bad just that its priced out of its league and cooling is awful for gaming on current laptops. The only…

To keep the chain of Cunningham's Law going, Valve's 2026 headset is called the Steam Frame, not the Index (which came out in 2019).

But Valve's ARM efforts even mean that Android devices can play some (mostly less graphically intensive) Steam games. That makes me very excited about the prospects for the future of gaming handhelds.

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

#33

Post by amluto »

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.

At least ChatGPT is now aware that Codex exists. I have a chat, still in my history, from a few months ago, in which I asked for help wrangling npm to get @openai/codex working, and ChatGPT said:

> Important: Codex CLI no longer exists

> OpenAI discontinued the Codex model + CLI a while back. There is no official binary named codex in any current OpenAI npm packages. OpenAI’s current CLI tool is:

    npm install -g openai
> which installs the openai command, not codex.

The world knowledge of these models is not necessarily up to date :)

edit: I replayed the same prompt into current ChatGPT and it is less clueless now. Maybe OpenAI noticed that it was utterly dumb that GPT-5.whatever didn't believe that Codex existed and fine-tuned it.

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

#34

Post by mywittyname »

simonh wrote: post #24
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.

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)?

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

#35

Post by jmalicki »

crdrost wrote: post #31
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 feels like half the problem in this blog post is dealing with memory access issues induced by QEMU and the VM boundary... it's probably something dumb I'm missing, but if you boot up Ubuntu in Docker, wouldn't the NVIDIA drivers still load? And then you wouldn't have to fight Apple about the memory management because OSX would still own the memory?

The driver wants to own the memory is the problem.

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

#36

Post by corry »

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.

LLMs are (broadly-speaking) poorly-positioned to give you a strong verdict on plausibility of a frontier topic. That said - ChatGPT was exactly right in its response to OP!

"Very deep", "border-line impractical" "in a research-sense" is the perfect summary of this article itself! :)

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

#37

Post by brcmthrowaway »

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.

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

#38

Post by swiftcoder »

crdrost wrote: post #31
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 feels like half the problem in this blog post is dealing with memory access issues induced by QEMU and the VM boundary... it's probably something dumb I'm missing, but if you boot up Ubuntu in Docker, wouldn't the NVIDIA drivers still load? And then you wouldn't have to fight Apple about the memory management because OSX would still own the memory?

> but if you boot up Ubuntu in Docker, wouldn't the NVIDIA drivers still load?

Even if the drivers loaded, they can't talk to the GPU from within docker (unless one implements PCI passthrough). MacOS owns the PCI bus in this scenario.

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

#39

Post by ericmay »

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.

> 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 a single mistake that's made even though you have actual humans today driving the wrong way down the highway, crashing in to buildings, drunk driving, stealing cars, and all sorts of other just absolutely stupid things.

We need to move away from this idea that because it's an AI system it should give you perfect responses. It's not a deterministic system and it can be wrong, though it should get better over time. Your Google search results are wrong all the time too. The NYT writes things that are factually incorrect. Why do we have such a high standard for these models when we don't apply them elsewhere?

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

#40

Post by sigmoid10 »

amluto wrote: post #33
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.

At least ChatGPT is now aware that Codex exists. I have a chat, still in my history, from a few months ago, in which I asked for help wrangling npm to get @openai/codex working, and ChatGPT said: > Important: Codex CLI no longer exists > OpenAI discontinued the Codex model + CLI a while back. There is no official binary named codex in any current OpenAI npm packages. OpenAI’s current CLI tool is: npm install -g opena…

>The world knowledge of these models is not necessarily up to date :)

It's amazing how this still needs to be said. Codex was released in April 2025. The initial GPT-5 and 5.1 still had a knowledge cutoff in late 2024. Like, what did you expect? Always beware the knowledge cutoff for LLMs (although recent releases have gotten much better with researching the web for updates before answering modern software topics).

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