4K Gaming... on Raspberry Pi!

[@shApYT]

Instead of mounting the GPU to the Pi, mount the Pi to the GPU. Absolute structural stability.

[@JeffGeerling]

4D Pi mounting options!

[@vyladence]

@@JeffGeerling just mount the pi in the future so you don't have to worry about it now!

[@Genesis8934]

I wonder if you could use a larger GPU that would otherwise need a full-size case and mount the Pi inside the GPU? More realistic probably is just 3d printing a test bench wrapper for your PSU; mount the Pi to the side and attach the graphics card to the top somehow on its side or something.

[@l3lue7hunder12]

Many ARM devices are small enough to be build into the eGPU stands base. Combine that with a very compact 350W range SFX or TFX power supply, and you'd be golden.

[@spotopolis]

@@Genesis8934 Yeah. This can be easily done too with any 3D printing slicer software. You can just grab the individual .stl models for each item, and then in the slicer join all models together. It may not look the best doing it this way, and you could run into weird issues with support, but as long as everything is a simple shape, its fairly simple. Ive done that for almost this same reason. I have a Minisforum MS-01 that I needed to run a PCIe-x8 card in that required power, so I found a .stl file that was an external case for an ATX PSU that had basically an endcap that kept all the cabled bundled up, while only allowing the ones you needed to pass through. I then joined a .stl for a PCIe-x16 riser / vertical mount GPU ribbon to that PSU print, so now the card is mounted and stable attached to the PSU case while the ribbon runs into the back of the MS-01.

[@MarcoGPUtuber]

Now it's time to fire up the Pi to watch Jeff Geerling in 4K play games in 4K on a Pi.

[@JeffGeerling]

Or do 8K upscaling with FSR! Haha

[@Az-jt2zp]

Pi ception

[@ThatRandomDude914]

Writing this comment on a 1B

[@modhappy]

Totaly Meta bruh...

[@modhappy]

Totally Meta bruh...😂

[@CognosSquare]

Swedish computer site Sweclockers was reporting on your last Pi GPU video 2 days ago. You are a legend Jeff.

[@zambonidriver42]

Your studio, you need a “recompile kernel counter” in the background.

[@PatrioticGestalt]

Hard work should be rewarded. Here you go. You inspire me.

[@jacobgames3412]

W

[@Visionary4787]

This setup is fascinating! It’s incredible to see the evolution of Pi hardware to the point where external GPUs are not only viable but practical. Your deep dive into the AMD GPU patch and Polaris cards shows just how far open-source drivers and Pi’s PCIe bus have come. The mix of gaming benchmarks with Doom and 4K transcoding possibilities makes this more than just a hobby project-it’s a legit, low-power home lab solution. I’d be curious to see how this rig would handle Blender or OBS for media creation and whether future patches can further optimize that PCI bandwidth bottleneck.

[@JeffGeerling]

I've so far found a lot of applications assume that arm64 == no possibility of having a GPU, so some things will have to wait for software devs to wake up to the fact that arm64 is a serious computing platform these days!

[@BogdanKatansky]

Just wait for the USB4 on smartphones. Docking them will unlock a lot of options for us.

[@airy_co]

When I first watched this video I didn't understand what and how are those connectors/adapted configured for this to work, but then I went to your blog post and read it, thanks for documenting this in that way! Super B video

[@JeffGeerling]

Blog > video (Except only like 1/1000th of my audience here reads blogs!)

[@johnbowles4754]

I​@@JeffGeerlingI'm a noobie to all of this, and a very old man too boot I'd love to read your blogs Jeff but I don't know how to find where they reside, brilliant video by the way 😊

[@rogerramjet8395]

@@johnbowles4754there's a link in the description. Click "…more" in the area under the video and you'll see it. 👍

[@johnbowles4754]

@@rogerramjet8395 thank you so much 💗

[@JeffGeerling]

@@johnbowles4754 I'll often link to a relevant article in the description-but it's all at www.jeffgeerling.com :)

[@evangelosdiamantisjr.9373]

Sweet Mother of Cable! I remember watching your older videos with the previous generation pi model, trying to figure out if there was a way to utilize an external graphics card. So happy it is finally possible with the new model and the help of others. I bet it was a quite an exciting and moving moment when the setup showed its first functioning picture/screen.

[@ericosnes9371]

Hey Jeff! Congrats on the baby and glad to see you back on YT. Really like your channel. I don’t always understand what you’re talking about but I still enjoy your content! Appreciate it. 👍

[@hydroponicgard]

Just a mini tip, check if your pi was not the bottleneck for GPU by using something like BTOP. It monitors *everything*, and I think (assumption) that your GPU is being bottlenecked by your CPU in Doom 3, hence it was not being 100% utilized. notation: This is not 100% coherent, just an assumption. If Jeff sees this, I'd be curious to know if it is being 100%ed, tho I don't remember if doom 3 is multithreaded. Thanks in forward! :)

[@JeffGeerling]

The CPU wasn't the bottleneck in Doom 3's case - it was only maybe 30-50% loaded. btop is awesome for that though! Doom Eternal was getting CPU bottlenecked, though. There may be some driver optimizations to remove that bottleneck, as a lot of it is in memory address translation.

[@Brain_pocketer]

Always a treat to see what you’ve been cooking up, Jeff.

[@skilledcamman4752]

Someone is gonna make a portable Mining RIG and hide it in some public place, stealing electricity.

[@LoganE01]

Solar might be better for that.....

[@shApYT]

Is gpu mining still a thing? Bitcoin only has value for online casinos.

[@Nivek389]

🤫

[@Atom224]

Aka a gaming laptop.

[@skilledcamman4752]

@@LoganE01 It will cost a lot, You will need a decent battery atleast.

[@418im_a_teapot4]

I've been following along your progress with compiling gpu drivers for the pi and i gotta say, it's impressive that it finally works. mad respect to the FOSS community

[@TuRmIx96]

Doom 3 has such a goated engine. I spent some time developing for idTech 4 and it’s amazingly modern for a 24 year old engine. Also it’s open source! So you can custom fit it to basically any architechture . Great video btw!

[@gregsmith1116]

Thanks Jeff. I am thoroughly impressed you got that video card mounted on the raspberry Pi 5!

[@victorwinkler2727]

This is an amazing video, thank you so much for your Input!

[@10100rsn]

This is awesome. This kind of work will always get a like from me. 😁

[@arch1107]

so much effort finally offered results, impressive work i didnt knew lian li made psus

[@StarFox1988]

I didnt think I'd see the day that these little SBCs would be able to use a external GPU - this is epic.

[@demirk.7358]

It took a really long time but you finally did it !!!

[@k1tajfar714]

I'd love to see your videos working on the drivers! Low level programming babyyyy!

[@JoeSpeed]

Jeff is always coming up with the funnest projects

[@BogdanKatansky]

Jeff you are paving the way for the future of smartphones. Once we have USB4 on them docking with eGPU would be the dream for the living room setup.

[@tatageek]

This is... amazing!! 🤩

[@dmacpher]

No power supply paper clip trick 😂?

[@JeffGeerling]

Heh after accidentally shorting out a 12v rail one time I decided to buy the nice hardware switch, with insulation!

[@dmacpher]

@@JeffGeerling that’s entirely too reasonable sir 😉

[@autohmae]

@@JeffGeerling if you do these things often... that sounds like the superior way to do it

[@_Zaid]

Once did it with a random piece of wire I found in a drawer!

[@kiodiekin]

Have u ran any tests with dedicated 4k capable games? I know the original doom 3 was made so long ago it wouldn’t be a dedicated 4k game but obviously upscale. Maybe games like cyber punk, zen pinball actual rendered 4k games and see how they perform

[@DrathVader]

With some PCI-E magic to run an HBA along with the GPU, you could have a pretty snappy Jellyfin instance running completely on a Pi. Pretty wild.

[@JerziTBoss]

There are plenty of usecases for GPU with RPi5. Emulation will benefit greatly from the added more powerful GPU, you can make steam machine with some additional translation layers but for steam link and some indie or older titles this should be plenty, mini 3D workstation sounds good too especially if you are into 3D printing since new blender versions take advantage of GPU power lot more than older versions. Photo and video editing software will benefit from more GPU power as well. The drivers and installation process needs some work but I'm sure it will get there. This is great proof of concept though.

[@DeepfriedChips]

i don't have the recompiled the linux kernel shirt but i have the mug instead, really cool to see this project going somewhere, would be fun to toy with a pi myself

[@CedroCron]

Well done Jeff, well done! 👏👏👏

[@Zedris]

Super exciting $300 octopus pi setups for jellyfin transcoding 😂😂😂

[@talhagenc9401]

we got 4k gameplay on raspberry before gta 6

[@JeffGeerling]

haha

[@LukeDupin]

This is actually really cool

[@ban3665]

Maybe we could compare the Raspberry Pi and Orange Pi.

[@JeffGeerling]

Orange Pi 5 Max is pretty awesome little hardware. Support side is a bit different, but if you can make use of it, it's a better value.

[@domramsey]

I love this. But I mainly use Macs and don't understand PCIE or M.2 or all the other adaptors. The last time I build a PC was 1998. I kind of want someone to make a large Pi case that just has a slot for a GPU and a single power supply that does everything so I can just plug & play and not have to have a janky setup with all kinds of adaptors.

[@jonmayer]

Could we get a kernel with Intel ARC support? AV1 transcoding on the cheap would be really cool.

[@JeffGeerling]

Intel has some open source drivers I haven't taken for a spin yet. Though they seem to have petered out releasing new GPUs lately :(

[@magfal]

I would have thrown an RX580 8GB in the slot, they are cheap and packs quite a decent little punch.

[@Knight8365]

Hi Jeff! Thanks for all the great videos. A tangential question; what do you do to protect your computers from EM interference? Recently solar storms have caused some strong surface EM interference. This has caused some down time for many, even big companies. I'm just wondering if some aluminium foil would reduce these effects or if a stronger solution is needed. Thanks again!

[@Mobile_Dom]

ngl ,i kinda just want an AV1 hardware encoder USB stick that i can plug into my Pi for jellyfin

[@autohmae]

USB-sticks exists for AI exist, so maybe that could be a thing in the future

[@Mobile_Dom]

@@autohmae i mean these things already existed in the past before hardware accelerated video blocks where on CPUs and GPUs, im just asking for them to make a comeback with modern standards :P

[@autohmae]

@@Mobile_Dom OK, well, I was just pointing out, some other things are already done this way. So it's not much of a stretch both ways

[@Mobile_Dom]

@@autohmae oh agreed, i didnt mean to some off as combative

[@autohmae]

@@Mobile_Dom no, don't worry, just that we understand each other 🙂

[@Beryesa.]

Jeff waiting for the year of egpu on pi feels more passionate than the endless year of linux desktop 😹

[@pimpstick2]

Chrome is trying to use VAAPI as your HWaccel, hence the issues. Are these cards new enough to support vulkan or OpenCL as your HWaccel? Arch has a package in the AUR called opencl-amd that's just the opencl part of ROCM without having to install ROCM. The rpi5 does not have video encoding hardware built into the CPU, so it is not practical to be used an encode server. But a low power/cost arm encode server would be a great use for some people.

[@Lavadawg]

Cannot wait to play supertuxkart on a 50 dollar sbc on my rx 6942 that costs 800 dolla

[@frogslayer4849]

Jeff Geerling you son of a bitch!!!! You finally did it! I knew you would eventually. I'm so happy for you and I'll probably try this out since you already blazed the trail.

[@danielktdoranie]

I’ve never had any issues with buffering on Jellyfin using standard Raspberry Pi and an external 4TB spinning rust hard drive with a USB 3.0

[@JeffGeerling]

Depends mostly on what format of videos you have, plus what transcoding settings you set up - I ran into issues a lot if I had 4K UHD BR rips, and tried streaming them to my phone at 1080p.

[@MyPhone-qg2eh]

Seems like a lot of hardware for a resolution I never really miss that much. I wish there was a better hat.

[@Digital-Scriptorium]

I'm curious. Have you tested Wine with it and can anything run under that? This also reminds me of when I was testing out my Snapdragon X Elite with an eGPU attached to it. Sadly no Nvidia drivers for Windows on ARM to make it happy but it at least did detect it.

[@Dontrel3030]

<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="434">7:14</a> I can report I've had trouble with hardware 10-bit encoding on the RX 570 in my pc as well, not sure what the issue is

[@JeffGeerling]

Huh, maybe driver support then! Sometimes hardware specs don't match up to what actually works :(

[@jamesprocter102]

Your info is priceless.

[@Mr8perezm]

Do you think you'll have time to setup popular old reliable LSI storage cards working on the Raspberry Pi 5? Like the LSI 9211-8i.

[@JeffGeerling]

I've been testing many LSI cards - it seems like the 93xx line is the first one that supports arm64 architecture in the drivers, so you have to get one of those I think, or newer.

[@Mr8perezm]

@@JeffGeerling That makes sense. No point creating drivers for products which are ancient in tech terms. At least prices have dropped massively for used 93xx cards since I last looked. I'll keep a look out for your future Lsi video. Actually, I watch all your videos, I've become a Geerling Geek .

[@TomboRectify]

<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="155">2:35</a> Or you could just short the green wire to GND. They're all black in modern PSUs but you can find the pin diagram on the internet.

[@LadsWhomuckaround]

Let's go! Also great video cheers

[@blindguitarfox]

omg you finally did it!

[@sandmanxo]

My newest gpu is probably 11 years old, I do want to try this out when I get a chance though

[@AlmostBrokeLbs]

why didnt you try minecraft, it has full linux support and full arm support

[@JeffGeerling]

Haven't had a chance, but will try it soon I hope!

[@AlmostBrokeLbs]

@@JeffGeerling thanks for replying, minecraft will be one of those games that will take advantage of external gpu on raspberry pi, maybe some shaders might work aswell

[@ferrellsl]

The next trick is to get an RTX4090 working on a C64.

[@xdevs23]

Very cool! It's nice to see those games running on alternative hardware. Also, as for Jellyfin, I run it on an ODROID H4 which has an Intel chip. According to Jellyfin Intel has the best transcode quality and the N97 can do like 2 4K transcode streams in realtime without any issues.

[@toast1797]

Wonder how if at all possible that would work on something like a Radxa Rock 5 ITX

[@olnnn]

Are you not able to use a more recent version of mesa? in the screenshots and on the stream it seemed like you were using 23.2 which is like a year old and there have been a lot of improvements since, both for amd gpus and the rpi 5 gpu. Also you should be able to use OpenCL via rusticl with the rx 460 if you set a environment variable (though it would probably work better if you are able to update to an newer version of mesa as it had just been added in 23.1)

[@jon1913]

Hats off to Coreforge!

[@Ut-s3u]

Great work Jeff

[@salvadorGC338]

My personal complain about running dGPUs on ARM or RISC-V (btw did you tryied on the Jupiter board in the end?) is that we dont really have a low power GPU to pair those SBC with, a RX6400 could be but im not sure if using RDNA2 is possible atm, and from Nvidia a GT1030 DDR5 is 30W, but is not that powerfull and im not even sure if that can run atm either.

[@LoganE01]

You could always limit the wattage, or under volt. Also Nvidia and AMD make a lot of lower wattage "professional" workstation cards... like the W7500 and the newish Nvidia A400....Which Jupiter board are you referring to?

[@salvadorGC338]

@@LoganE01 The Milk-V Jupiter that Jeff has, i tried myselft on the Lichee PI 3A that has the same SOC but getting the kernel code of the K1 and Biabuntu OS is behind some chinese site that i need to register to get the ssh keys i just gived up at that point. The Biabuntu OS for the K1 dosent include the kernel modules for radeon or nvidia gpus.

[@JeffGeerling]

I have an A400 on hand, hope to test with that too soon. Maybe Nvidia's newer drivers have better arm64 support... It's not super fast, but it's a ton better than the iGPUs on these little Arm SBCs!

[@JeffGeerling]

It does take a little more effort to get the GPUs going on Jupiter, I was close but didn't quite have it up last month. May try again soon.

[@chironbramberger]

Amazing! Thanks for making all these great videos. Would this maybe make a cool little Plex server?

[@ezforsaken]

what I imagine is a very cheap SBC that features m.2 + a cheap mining adapter (m.2 -> usb -> 1x slot) + GPU + cheap switching 12v PSU (400w or so would power GPU and SBC) and that will reduce the whole rig price so much. Now 3d print some basic mounts and you have a single gpu mining rig for like 60~ bucks. Scaling from there is just replicating the setup, you can use a lot of deployment features that will get you from a brand new sbc to a fully running and configured rig very quickly. If anything fails it's always a very cheap replacement, and the whole thing would be very easy to monitor. If only gpu mining was worth it on late 2024 lol.

[@Carhill]

If SteamOS releases, this is going to spawn a whole market of small game stations. Such a cool idea.

[@gamethecupdog]

<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="362">6:02</a> Actually, according to an internal steam change that steamdb managed to pick up, valves been playing around with arm, along with tools like fex and waydroid

[@jb123rnd]

I've actually had no issue getting LLM's to run on older graphics cards and with Llama 3.2's models being under 2GB you can spin up a baremetal LLM with Ollama without too much issue (assuming the software support is there). I would be very curious if it would be possible to get a slightly more modern AMD GPU that's Ollama supported running, especially once multi-modal support is in it could make for an interestingly sized computer vision system.

[@autohmae]

When I check the release page, they have ollama-linux-arm64. Then again, an LLM can also still be CPU bound even if they have enough GPU, so I think that might be a problem.

[@MatthewTyndall]

haha I was just thinking last night about putting an old GPU on raspberry pi and thought I should search if anyone has done this, and then this was on my for you page

[@JeffGeerling]

Apparently Google reads your mind!

[@autohmae]

I don't think it's Google, it's: great minds think alike and capabilities of hardware make things possible.

[@smashpro1]

*LowSpecGamer breathing heavily*

[@TheGreatAtario]

And here i was, all proud of myself for finally getting my Lubuntu laptop's sdcard reader working again

[@mrgeebee1622]

Cool. The sound in this video sounds a bit weird, it's like a background noise.

[@ricky_pigeon]

This will only get easier to play games on things like the raspberry pi with Proton ARM. Something Valves working on but i don't think much is public yet.

[@dfgaJK]

You should cut an oculink cable in half and solder it to custom FPC cable!

[@dfgaJK]

Maybe even have stiffener on the FPC with a hole to screw the FPC to the PI standoff.

[@JeffGeerling]

Heh, definitely room for improvement in terms of the 'jank factor' here! I'm thinking an Oculink HAT might be useful at least.

[@13bmitchell]

Getting an old Dell/HP/LEnovo with a 7th Gen Intel and using quicksync for the video transcoding is probably the better option. But good to know some of the options out there.

[@DKali-gn7xj]

i love this stuff. great video. what would really be awesome is if you could provide a .img file of the pre-complied items to the OS, etc. I know, you've done all the hard work, but would be cool if we could grab your image, and all the items and try it ourselves without to much trouble. then we could just focus on what apps and gaming might work on it. THANKS!

[@meowtime1115]

oh wow and isnt proton working on arm

[@twooey8232]

I've been really curious to how well games work with box86 on the Pi with a GPU.

[@DamjanDimitrioski]

Can you test few parallel GPU cards whether they can run llama AI models using rpi?

[@EpikIzCool]

that chrome issue happens on my ryzen cpu with amdgpu. So i dont think its arm related.

[@JeffGeerling]

Ha! Glad it's not just me then.

[@JarPlace]

do a video on the most cost effective (possibly pi based?) homelab media server. should have 4 drive NAS with raid and also video transcoding so that it supports all modern videos (my pi5 works for jellyfin but some video formats are jittery) so then I could potentially have an all-in-one nas with a gpu, serving video and doing some ai tasks! otherwise I am thinking of just building a computer in a case, but it would be way more expensive... looking at most cost effective solutions and I already have a pi5 doing most of the job!

[@JohnneyleeRollins]

can we get a dad geerling channel please

[@JeffGeerling]

Check out Geerling Engineering!

[@JohnneyleeRollins]

im extra extra extra subscribed to that channel now thanks for being two steps ahead again jeff

[@arkeidian1]

Make a 3D housing for it to house both the GPU and the Pi on top!

[@JustMortHandle]

Next up has to be something like Over:board, a CM4 Mini-ITX motherboard. Then we can hope the RPI foundation will use the same form factor for the CM-board in the future!

[@Genesis8934]

<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="497">8:17</a> I think it does. I think you can either disable this in settings or it might be in the chrome flags page. That said, I don't know if the Pi CPU is capable of running Chrome without hardware accel lol (maybe!).

[@bluephreakr]

Getting Intel Arc GPUs to run with the Pi would be a boon for people who bought the blue cards cheap with the promise _some day_ they'd be worth a damn. There will be plenty of older Intel Arc cards on the market for relatively cheap, if they aren't there already and the Intel software should be fairly close to feature-complete in Linux land for ease of porting and use by skilled developers who want to flex its surprisingly-potent cheap AV1 muscle

[@johnsimon8457]

<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="109">1:49</a> - plugging a GPU into the top of a raspberry pi will never not be funny

[@Cjb-nuc9extremegamer]

Unfortunately it still seems like "Heavy" Gaming on Rpi 5 might be a bit far away, Mainly due to the x1 link and the dependence on the micro SD, I'm still waiting for a RPi CM5 w/ 512 GB-1 TB of EMMC.

[@noel737]

I know that using AMD has the advantage of being able to use extra/cheap old cards, but what about using an Intel card? At least for a media server set-up, I imagine the transcoding would be even better

[@notsure1248]

Jeff sorry if you've already done this and I just missed the video. Id love to see hash rate comparisons on this gpu inside of a pc and then attached to the pi5 in something like hashcat. I'd love to know the overhead loss.

[@lugxnyt2310]

So when do you plan on releasing your own ARM SBC with full PCIe x16 gen3+ support? Isnt the hardest part of hardware engineering making the software?

[@mythosmintv2]

Very cool! I wonder if Intel arc a310 would work well because it support a ton of codecs and Intel usually open sources a lot of their stuff

[@moocow1452]

Steam is a tough nut to crack on ARM, but once someone gets it going, it’s going to be amazing.

[@mylittleparody2277]

Awesome ! I wish I had enough knowledge to help, but that's not the case. Unless you need a custom PCB XD

[@sonickautschuhe]

what's the name of your gpu monitoring cli tool?

[@sonickautschuhe]

found the answer at 5:34 :p

[@JeffGeerling]

@@sonickautschuhe nvtop, that's it!

[@bluephreakr]

*You don't need Steam to play your Steam titles!* Lutris should be all you need for that, and it's because the people behind it, as well Bottles and Heroic (amid other projects and volunteers) are actively developing a fork of Valve's pressure-vessel and related software under the Umu namesake for Open Wine Components. This effort will unify the various means of executing specific titles and run them _exactly_ as Valve would with Proton!

[@cjhmdm]

seems counterintuitive at this point. Part of the idea of the rpi is the small footprint. At this rate, you're better off just building a midrange mini-itx pc.

[@mcafalchio]

Please test the orangepi5

[@LoganE01]

Hopefully someone comes along, and engineers a 2 in 1 solution of a case ...it would most definitely sell better than hot cakes, plus it would clean up the GPU-Pi setup, and get more units in the hands of more developers, and testers. ... A cheaper "low profile" variant and a "normal" one for larger cards, that require external power....... I know one thing this makes me so excited to see this become the norm..... I bet steam will even have a ARM category eventually...

[@JeffGeerling]

I do hope Steam starts treating arm64 as a first class architecture soon. It sounds like they may at least be tinkering with the idea!

[@Motolav]

Within the Mesa project there's Rusticl which provides OpenCL 3 for compute on modern AMD GPUs, OpenCL support for Mesa is usually packaged separately

[@kennyking9667]

cant wait to add to my drone

[@the-floofy-mew]

Just ask can it run a xtx of 24gigs of vram... could be useful for ai stuff... and games/emu's