Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

RTX 5090 and M4 MacBook Air: Can It Game?

scottjg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 195 posts

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

#81

Post by pjmlp »

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.

The missed opportunity is like with server market, now giving the workstation market to Windows and Linux.

It isn't only audio and video.

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

#82

Post by pjmlp »

bigyabai wrote: post #47
Aurornis wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I don’t know about that. Apple supported some full size GPUs in past product lines and the number of users was very small. Granted, LLMs change that demand but the audience for Mac Pro buyers who would use a full-size GPU that is impossible to obtain is almost nothing compared to their lap…

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…

Yes, because they already moved on to workstations powered by either Windows or Red-Hat Linux/Ubuntu.

The only ones left were people like John Siracusa that still hoped to the very last minute, that Apple would change their mind.

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

#83

Post by scottjg »

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!

two semi interesting things to note around this:

1. Virtualization.framework seems to support some form of GPU passthrough from the host (granted, not eGPU - it's for the integrated GPU). I think the primary use case is having macOS guests get acceleration, while still sharing GPU time with the host. There is also a patch that recently hit QEMU mainline that supports using the "venus server" with virtio-gpu to support a similar functionality for Linux guests under Hypervisor.framework.

2. Apple internally has some kind of PCI Passthrough support available in Virtualization.framework. It seems like the code is shipped to customers in the framework, but it relies on some kind of kext or kernel component that isn't shipped in retail macOS. I can't say if that's intended to ever be released to customers, but clearly someone at Apple has thought about this the feature.

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

#84

Post by ericmay »

reaperducer wrote: post #75
ericmay wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

"Things exist as they are today and can't possible change or improve in the future".

People lie all the time too. You're just radicalizing yourself to create a bias for no reason other than concocting a straw man expectation that you made up for yourself. What's the point of that?

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

#85

Post by lowbloodsugar »

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 will be surprised if the M6 doesn't come with silicon just for that, as its the current gap. M5 is quite adequate for token generation for the price, given the RAM quantity and bandwidth. An M6 that accelerates TTFT would make an eGPU irrelevant.

For gaming, the threadripper gets at least +50FPS for windows vs linux, and some games just freeze for periods of time on linux with things like dynamic frame generation. I have an SSD for windows just for gaming.

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

#87

Post by lowbloodsugar »

moralestapia wrote: post #3

Wow, phenomenal project and write-up, thanks for sharing it. "no - not in any practical sense today, and "maybe" only in a very deep, borderline-impractical research sense." This is why humans will always rule over crappy LLMs.

Every major moment in my career has been me doing something that another human or clique of humans has said is impossible. If you think this is purely an LLM trait, I can't imagine you've tried to achieve anything important in the real world.

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

#88

Post by scottjg »

Moosdijk wrote: post #76
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…

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.

the exact numbers in the graph are 17019ms vs 142ms. so you're right, it's not 120x, it's 119.85x.

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

#89

Post by Forgeties79 »

> step one in most of my projects now is to ask AI about it. Maybe it’ll tell me something I don’t know.

Bingo. This is exactly how I use LLM. I like getting a gut check, seeing what the first recommendations are or if there is some deep flaw in what I think the approach is, and I almost never copy/paste whatever it spits back or just follow its instructions.

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

#90

Post by hedora »

pjmlp wrote: post #80
caycep wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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?

Post reply on HN