Pineboards, a manufacturer of expansion boards for Raspberry Pi, has demonstrated how far PCIe support has come with the Pi 5. With one of their products, the company connected an AMD Radeon graphics card to a Raspberry Pi 5 and played a full-fledged open-source 3D game.
According to Pineboards, it took about an hour to set up the system. It was created on the basis of Raspberry Pi 5 with the HAT uPCIty Lite board. This card allows you to connect any PCIe card to the corresponding PCIe bus on the Raspberry Pi 5. The computer has one PCIe x4 slot, but it is open — this means that you can connect an x16 card to it.
We used an AMD Radeon RX 460 (probably from Gigabyte) in the experiment. A 400W be quiet! ATX PSU was used to power the video card. After applying «some small driver fixes» provided by Coreforge, the Pineboards were able to play SuperTuxKart 3D racing with full 4K display support.
Got it working!
SuperTuxKart working in 4K on a @Raspberry_Pi 5 without any problems through an external AMD GPU 😎@geerlingguy it seems things have improved since your video last year, it was a very simple setup for us pic.twitter.com/5kXyvmeewJ
— Pineboards (@Pineboards) August 14, 2024
The Raspberry Pi 5 has fixed the bus flaws previously found by enthusiasts, but there was a problem with the Linux GPU drivers for ARM. With a lot of help, many hours of debugging, and nerves, YouTuber and journalist Jeff Gierling was able to get the Radeon RX 460 working and run some tests in glmark2, but gaming was still out of reach.
As you can see in the video, the SuperTuxKart works well in the assembled system. Recently, the community has made many improvements to the Linux kernel drivers for the Raspberry Pi 5, and Pineboards has noted some exciting changes in their performance.
Source: Tom’s Hardware
Spelling error report
The following text will be sent to our editors: