Very nice effort. This has incredible technical depth, particularly in the DMA and QEMU sections. I also like that you didn't oversell it as the ideal Mac gaming solution. I found the AI inference results to be the most fascinating. Overall, it was a great read.
RTX 5090 and M4 MacBook Air: Can It Game?
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Re: RTX 5090 and M4 MacBook Air: Can It Game?
#72> Because OpenGL is not well-supported anymore on macOS, the game is completely unplayable there, even with CrossOver. Ironically, it plays totally fine on a Windows PC, but this is a game you literally can’t play on Mac without this eGPU setup. I understand that this is true it seems that Doom does support Vulkan but you would need to add VK_NV_glsl_shader to MoltenVK. Probably much less work than what went into han…
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Re: RTX 5090 and M4 MacBook Air: Can It Game?
#73I 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?)
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Re: RTX 5090 and M4 MacBook Air: Can It Game?
#74Wait, this is incredible. I have a spare 5090 lying around and run a claw-like on my M4 Mini. Just plugging it into some sort of 3D print frame for stability and plugging it into the TB port might get me a pretty viable tool for local inference. Would need something neat to ensure the power etc. is well fed.
The problem is `max-num-seqs` and `max-model-len` fight each other, and unless you're in the pure single-client mode you'll need multiple slots so to speak.
Re: RTX 5090 and M4 MacBook Air: Can It Game?
#75Earlier 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…
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?
The New York Times publishes a "corrections" section in each issue. Let me know where I can view the 60TB file where ChatGPT fesses up to its daily fails.
Re: RTX 5090 and M4 MacBook Air: Can It Game?
#76Excellent 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…
It feels pedantic to point it out, but it’s actually 113x faster.
Seeing the author present their results like this give off the impression that they’re biased, which I am sure they aren’t.
Re: RTX 5090 and M4 MacBook Air: Can It Game?
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
OpenAI being more aware of the implications would help too--last year I also struggled with using Codex to write scripts to run Codex headless, because it kept insisting that Codex was a retired model from the GPT-3 days and not a program that could be called by a script.
Re: RTX 5090 and M4 MacBook Air: Can It Game?
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 wa…
True, they could do any number of things. But a datacenter play would appear quite random to investors and their core audience. Broadcom + Nvidia however...
Apple seems to be content to sell shovels in the AI gold rush.
Admittedly… what’s on my desk? A MacBook M4 Air, a Mac Studio, and there’s an x86 iMac in the corner.
What goes in the travel bag? A MacBook Pro or the Air.
Every time I look at buying something else the math doesn’t add up.
The 5090 sits in a commodity PC chassis. It’s not like I need a model running on my own computer.
Re: RTX 5090 and M4 MacBook Air: Can It Game?
#79Earlier 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?
You're holding it wrong.
Re: RTX 5090 and M4 MacBook Air: Can It Game?
#80I 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?)
Never, a couple of years ago Apple gave up on the server market, that is why having Swift on Linux is so relevant for app developers.
Now they gave up on the workstation market that really enjoys their slots for all myriad of cards.
Having a thunderbolt cable salad is only for those that miss external extensions from 8 and 16 bit home computer days.
Which is clearly what Apple is nowadays focused, if you look back at the vertical integrations before the PC clones market took off.
So now if you really need a workstation, it is either Windows, or one of those systems sold with Red-Hat Enterprise/Ubuntu from IBM, Dell , HP.