Raspberry Pi 5 teams up with Radeon GPU to run Doom Eternal with RTX on at 4K — the combo also tackles Crysis Remastered, Red Dead Redemption 2, and Forza Horizon 4
Originally published on tomshardware.com by Mark Tyson on 16 November 2024
Jeff Geerling, a well-known Raspberry Pi enthusiast, has demonstrated the impressive capability of the Raspberry Pi 5 to run modern AAA games like Doom Eternal, Crysis Remastered, Red Dead Redemption 2, and Forza Horizon 4 at 4K resolution using an external GPU (eGPU). Despite the modest specifications of the $50 single-board computer, these experiments reveal both its potential and its current limitations.
Geerling’s earlier experiments featured older titles such as Doom 3 running at 4K60 using a Radeon RX 460. More recently, advances in AMD driver support for RX 6000 and RX 7000 series GPUs have enabled him to connect a Radeon RX 6700 XT to the Raspberry Pi 5. This setup allows for testing newer games, albeit with limitations. In his experiments, Doom Eternal averaged around 20 frames per second at 4K without ray tracing and dropped to an unplayable 12 frames per second with ray tracing enabled. Even at a lower resolution of 720p, the game struggled to maintain 30 frames per second due to the Pi’s CPU acting as a bottleneck. GPU utilization was often below 50%, illustrating that the rest of the system could not keep up with the graphics card’s capabilities.
The Raspberry Pi’s inherent hardware constraints, including limited CPU power, restricted PCIe bandwidth, and a maximum of 8GB of RAM, significantly hinder its ability to handle the demands of modern games at high settings. While the updated Radeon drivers do support hardware video transcoding, features like machine learning acceleration and AMD ROCm remain unavailable for ARM-based systems.
Despite these challenges, Geerling’s work showcases the versatility of the Raspberry Pi platform. Although it is not a practical gaming solution for AAA titles, it highlights the potential of future ARM-based systems to evolve into more capable gaming or high-performance computing platforms. This project reflects the ingenuity of the Raspberry Pi community and the ongoing efforts to push its limits.
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