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M5 Max MacBook Pro paired with RTX 5090 in an eGPU dock
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Apple’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.
Key facts
- In Cyberpunk, at the same settings at 1080p, performance drops down to above 60 FPS on the M5 Max MacBook and below 50 FPS on the M4-powered MacBook Air
- Goldman states that FEX incurs a roughly 50% performance penalty on the CPU compared to native ARM processing
- 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
- A few other quirks the software engineer had to address included setting up PCI BAR and enabling DMA (Direct Memory Access)
Summary
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. A few other quirks the software engineer had to address included setting up PCI BAR and enabling DMA (Direct Memory Access). 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.