M4 MacBook Air with RTX 5090 eGPU reaches 111 FPS in Cyberpunk 2077 with frame generation
Scott Goldman has tested an unusual Mac gaming setup, pairing an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 with an M4 MacBook Air through a Thunderbolt eGPU dock. This is not native macOS support for NVIDIA gaming. The setup runs an ARM Linux VM on macOS, passes the GPU through to Linux, then uses Proton and FEX to run Windows x86 games.
Source: Scott Goldman
This follows the earlier TinyGPU story we covered last month, where Tiny Corp’s Apple-approved driver brought GeForce RTX 50 and Radeon support to macOS . That driver was more limited and not aimed at regular gaming. This new test takes a different route, using Linux, QEMU, NVIDIA’s Linux driver, Proton and several patches to make games run on Apple Silicon with an external RTX 5090. To put it simply, it’s no easy task.
GeForce RTX 5090 eGPU tested
The main gaming test was Cyberpunk 2077. At 1080p RT Ultra, the native M4 MacBook Air result was only 7 FPS, or 13 FPS with FSR frame generation. With the RTX 5090 eGPU, the same MacBook Air reached 30 FPS, or 119 FPS with DLSS frame generation. At 4K RT Ultra, the native MacBook Air was around 3 FPS, while the RTX 5090 eGPU setup reached 27 FPS, or 111 FPS with DLSS frame generation.
The results also show the cost of running through several compatibility layers. A gaming PC with the same RTX 5090 installed through native PCIe reached 100 FPS at 4K RT Ultra in Cyberpunk 2077, or 282 FPS with DLSS frame generation. The M5 Max MacBook Pro with the same eGPU reached 47 FPS at 4K RT Ultra, or 145 FPS with frame generation. According to the test, the native PCIe gaming PC was still roughly twice as fast as the M5 Max eGPU setup.
Source: Scott Goldman
Shadow of the Tomb Raider showed a similar pattern. The M4 MacBook Air reached 8 FPS at 4K natively, but improved to 40 FPS with the RTX 5090 eGPU. At 1080p, performance increased from 26 FPS to 42 FPS. The close result between 1080p and 4K suggests the bottleneck was not the GPU, but the CPU side after virtualization and x86 translation.
Not every game worked. Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered could not start its benchmark even at 720p low because the setup hit the platform’s DMA mapping limit. Doom 2016 did run, with the in-game overlay showing around 49 FPS. Crysis Remastered also ran at playable frame rates on the M4 MacBook Air with the RTX 5090 eGPU, although the gaming PC was nearly four times faster in the same test.
I mean, it’s great that using a modern desktop GPU on Apple Silicon is even possible, but it’s clearly complicated and doesn’t deliver good results, at least for gamers. Scott’s blog has more tests, focused on synthetic and AI benchmarks, but we believe the RTX 5090’s primary role should always be gaming.
Source: Scottjg
