Testing High-Performance GPUs on Raspberry Pi 5: Bandwidth Limitations vs. Real-World Utility
By
mikece
Crackling crust, pillowy middle. The kind of bagel that earns a second cup of coffee.
Summary
The article explores whether high-performance graphics cards (GPUs) can be effectively used with low-bandwidth systems like the Raspberry Pi 5, despite its limited PCIe Gen 3 single-lane connection compared to modern desktops with 16 lanes of PCIe Gen 5. The author tests various GPUs from AMD, Intel, and Nvidia on a Raspberry Pi 5 to determine if bandwidth limitations significantly impact real-world utility, challenging the assumption that big GPUs require big PCs.
Key quotes
· 5 pulledEver since I got AMD, Intel, and Nvidia graphics cards to run on a Raspberry Pi, I had a nagging question: What's the point?
The Raspberry Pi only has 1 lane of PCIe Gen 3 bandwidth available for a connection to an eGPU. That's not much.
Especially considering a modern desktop has at least one slot with 16 lanes of PCIe Gen 5 bandwidth. That's 8 GT/s versus 512 GT/s. Not a fair fight.
But I wondered if bandwidth isn't everything, all the time.
I wanted to put the question of utility to rest, by testing four things on a variety of GPUs, comparing performance on a Raspberry Pi 5 to a modern desktop.
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