The Raspberry Pi line is full of capable compact computers, but they’ve never been the strongest in the bunch when it comes to graphical output. Nor have they been particularly expandable in that regard. However, that’s all beginning to change, with [Jeff Geerling] reporting success getting external GPUs to work on the Raspberry Pi 5.
Unlike previous Raspberry Pis, the Raspberry Pi 5 has a less quirky implementation for its PCI Express bus. Previous editions have thrown up issues when trying to work with GPUs, but [Jeff] has found much more success this time around. He’s gotten an AMD RX 460 to work with the setup, and has got it running quite a bit of the glmark2 test regime. He’s working on a variety of other AMD cards too, but suspects NVidia parts could be harder due to some initialization issues that are proving difficult to quash.
It still takes some funky adapters and a lot of work, but finally GPUs are starting to work with the platform. Keep up with his list of card trials on the PiPCI website. We’ve seen [Jeff]’s work with earlier iterations of the Raspberry Pi before, too. Video after the break.
Really interesting
Graphics card can now have a CPU daughterboard
This is actually something I’ve thought about. Someone should start producing mini PCs, where the whole case is effectively a display stand for a GPU. There’d be a PCI-E slot sticking out on top, along with a sleek 90° GPU power cable. They already put high-end CPUs in mini PCs so it seems like a no-brainer.
Or make a really kickass arcade machine!
Intel NUC Dragon Canyon!
I was stuck running a full sized nividia quadro tethered to a type 6 comexpress board for almost a year before I managed to get an mxm breakout cable. The disproportion was comical.
🤣🤣🤣
Already have an SSD slot.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/21158/asus-intros-geforce-rtx-4060-ti-with-m2-ssd-slot
When I saw this article in my feed the very first thing that came to my mind was if someone could make a replacement back plate for the GPU that would allow the raspberry pi to mount directly to the back of the GPU.
will it run doom in 8K?
…asking the real question…
Will it Run Doom in 8K
Be interesting to see if ML/AI models perform anywhere near their full fledged counterparts (when fully fleshed out) because I could see a small compact “network” GPU Compute system being useful for research tasks and small local compute tasks.
Do you guys think it’ll run doom in 8k?
But will it run DOOM in 8K?
Any chance this could run doom in 8K?
But, will it run DOOM? In 8K?
Seriously though, can I mine Bitcoin on it?
You can mine bitcoin on a GameBoy. The question is, should you?
Once I can run a modded Skyrim/Fallout3/New Vegas in a DIY portable console for my daily commute, I’ll be the happiest person in the Tokyo subway.
Its called steam deck
To hell with Doom in 8K
Can it run Frogger in 8K?
Do you realise that you may have started a revolution? This demo has shown a massive amount of possibilities. Thank you for your hard work. Once the open source community gets stuck into this there will an explosion of new applications. WOW!
This is really cool but I see it more of a benefit in the future as far as graphics cards go. I would think that they limited memory and processing power on the soc might bottleneck a GPU. If you are talking about AI that could be a very big deal.
I wonder if they have tested SATA or SAS cards on it yet. What about NICs?
SATA or SAS for NAS application and NICs for router applications.
Or course it would also be handy for adding an FPGA on to one.
Jeff has a good resource on this, though mostly of known compatible with the CM4
https://pipci.jeffgeerling.com/
I want this for ML. Can you get this to work with Nvidia and CUDA?
He’s reported the NVidia driver doesn’t load, and it’s not open source so it’s for NVidia themselves to fix.
On a side channel: How universal are those USB-C docking stations? They can have a decent graphics card, Ethernet Keyboard/Mouse/USB, charging and possibly a bunch of other stuff and they push it all though an USB-C cable, and it also comes in a nice box. Are those things mostly using standard protocols or do they use vendor specific extensions or maybe even locked to certain hardware?
The short answer is they are not at all universal despite the name, at least when you are after graphics. For the pure USB devices in them functionality should meet the ‘Universal’ name, might work rather slower than you expect but should at least work.
The long answer is full of weird, to get external graphics to work you need your device to support the right mode on that USB-C port which many devices will not (in many cases not all the features the device can do are even available on every port, and my experience says the documentation won’t ever tell you which ones should do what – and equally important many devices just flat out won’t have that functionality – in some cases that ‘USB-C’ port is just USB-2.0 in the drag). Then you also need the cable to support that data rate (and have the right pins populated at all) which is far from certain. And then even if all that is fine you can end up in trouble in the software world – actually rendering via or transitioning to the external graphics may or may not happen properly, though on the whole that issue is more fixed than it was I still see reports of it being problematic.
Should help offset electricity costs now that GPUs draw so much power.
Yet Pi5 still relies on SD cards for storage…but wait, there’s a m.2 hat you can buy and wedge above your required Pi5 heat sink…
Why don’t they get with the program and put a m.2 sata or similar i/o device on the bottom of the board?
The current generation always needs to have a flaw to make you look forward to the next generation.