Apple-approved TinyGPU driver lets RTX 5090 run on a Mac mini, it’s not fast but works
© TinyCorp /Alex Ziskind Tiny Corp says Apple has approved its TinyGPU driver, which lets AMD and NVIDIA external GPUs run on macOS over USB4 or Thunderbolt. TinyGPU documentation lists macOS 12.1 or newer, a USB4 or Thunderbolt connection, and AMD RDNA3+ or NVIDIA Ampere+ GPUs as the current requirements.
If you have a Thunderbolt or USB4 eGPU and a Mac, today is the day you've been waiting for! Apple finally approved our driver for both AMD and NVIDIA. It's so easy to install now a Qwen could do it, then it can run that Qwen… pic.twitter.com/daUsyBHh1W
— the tiny corp (@__tinygrad__) April 1, 2026
Alex Ziskind has now shown the feature working with a GeForce RTX 5090 connected to a Mac mini M4 Pro. On NVIDIA hardware, the setup uses the TinyGPU driver extension together with a Docker-based compiler path. This is not native Metal support and it is not a return of official NVIDIA macOS drivers. At this stage, the stack is built around tinygrad and AI inference workloads rather than gaming.
The demo shows that Blackwell hardware can now run local inference on macOS, but software is still the main limit. Based on the benchmark results shown in Ziskind’s video, the RTX 5090 reached about 7.48 tokens per second in one Llama 3.1 8B test, and time to first token was faster than Metal in some chat-style workloads. At the same time, llama.cpp on Metal remained far faster overall, which points to kernel maturity rather than a bandwidth issue on the external link.
Source: Alex Ziskind
TinyGPU already handles the hardware link and driver install, but the generated kernels still need more work before Blackwell-class cards can show the level of throughput their raw specs suggest.
As Alex points out, TinyGPU is not meant to compete with llama.cpp, at least not yet. llama.cpp is still much faster. TinyGPU uses a new driver written from scratch, and it still needs further optimization. That may come later, but it is not the focus right now.
What TinyGPU does deliver is support for GeForce RTX 50 and Radeon GPUs on macOS through a third-party driver. That was not possible on Apple Silicon Macs just a few months ago.
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