GoKawiilApple’s M5 Max SoC flagship is one of the fastest pieces of silicon around and can compete with flagship consumer desktop chips from AMD and Intel in at least some workloads. Logically, this also makes it a great gaming CPU if paired with high-end GPU hardware. Software engineer Scott J. Goldman put this idea to the test and found a way to run Nvidia’s flagship RTX 5090 graphics card on an M5 Max-powered MacBook Pro using virtualization and an eGPU dock. His results revealed that gaming on an RTX 5090 via a MacBook can deliver a great experience in modern AAA games, as long as frame generation is enabled.
The setup process was anything but easy. ARM-based MacBooks don’t officially support eGPU gaming with Nvidia GPUs, requiring Goldman to make a plethora of tweaks to enable it, most notably through virtualization with a Linux OS. MacOS does not support Nvidia GPUs (there is no native driver support), and Linux does not natively support Thunderbolt on Apple silicon. Virtualization gets around this problem by leveraging the strengths of macOS and Linux.
A few other quirks the software engineer had to address included setting up PCI BAR and enabling DMA (Direct Memory Access). One strange problem Goldman had to fix was a scheduling issue in QEMU where the default settings caused benchmark scores to fluctuate sporadically, due to a configuration issue in which the virtualization app did not set any priority level for the virtual CPU threads.
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Beyond setting up a Linux virtual machine, implementing the FEX translation layer was also necessary to convert x86 instructions into ARM-based instructions that the M4 Max chip can understand. This was necessary as virtually no PC games support ARM.
With this software setup, the software engineer tested his M5 Max MacBook against a couple of other systems paired with an RTX 5090, featuring an older M4 Air, a 2020 Intel-powered Macbook Pro that is critically running Linux natively with no emulation or translation layers, and an i5-12600K gaming PC representing a traditional desktop experience. He also added benchmarks of the M4 and M5 Max devices running off their integrated GPUs.
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His performance benchmarks reveal that the eGPU setup on the M5 Max and M4 MacBooks can deliver a smooth gaming experience as long as frame generation is used. Cyberpunk ran at well over 100 FPS on both Mac devices at the RT Ultra preset with frame generation enabled, despite the overhead of FEX translation, a virtualized Linux environment, and the RTX 5090 running off a Thunderbolt eGPU.
However, performance falls apart without frame generation. In Cyberpunk, at the same settings at 1080p, performance drops down to just above 60 FPS on the M5 Max MacBook and below 50 FPS on the M4-powered MacBook Air. Performance on the M4 system is so bad that the Core i7-1068NG7 in the 2020 MacBook Pro with the RTX 5090 achieves almost identical frame rates. By contrast, the Core i5-12600K system achieved over 150 FPS without frame generation. In other games that the software engineer was able to get running without crashing (Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Crysis Remastered), performance was below 60 FPS.
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