I plugged an Nvidia RTX 5090 right into a gaming handheld Leave a comment

Two weeks in the past, I confirmed you how the world’s quickest graphics card works in a small kind issue PC. To my shock, Nvidia’s RTX 5090 Founders Version delivered the overwhelming majority of its efficiency even in a 12.7-liter desktop with a five-year-old CPU.

It made me surprise: what if I plugged this card right into a handheld gaming PC as an alternative? So I did, and let me let you know: it’s a surprise to behold. It’s sufficient to make me consider in a wealthy future the place handhelds get extra highly effective once you dock them at dwelling.

I began with the identical $1,999 RTX 5090 FE and 1000-watt energy provide from my desktop check, dropping them each onto a $99 Minisforum DEG1. It’s an open-air exterior GPU that may hook up with the Oculink port that’s now transport in a handful of moveable gaming PCs, as long as you deliver your personal desktop GPU and energy provide.

I plugged that Oculink cable into a $1,000 GPD Win Max 2 handheld. After which, with simply an AMD Ryzen 8840U cellular CPU and 4 lanes of PCIe 4.0 bandwidth, fairly than the 16 lanes of PCIe 5.0 that Nvidia’s GPU technically helps, my new Franken-desktop spit hearth anyhow. I’m speaking over 100 frames per second in Cyberpunk 2077 at 4K decision and Extremely settings. I’m speaking about playable body charges in all probably the most intensive video games at 4K and near-maximum specs.

Throughout our eight check video games, it did run between 7 p.c and 47 p.c slower than when my colleague Tom Warren paired a 5090 with the quickest gaming CPU cash should purchase. But it surely was solely 4 to 29 p.c slower than that 5090 in my SFF desktop and much quicker than after I caught an RTX 3080 in that desktop. And it was 4 to 12 instances quicker than the hand held’s Radeon 780M built-in GPU might handle by itself.

For instance, my GPD Win Max 2 evaluate unit averages simply 17fps in Name of Obligation: Black Ops 6 at Excessive spec on the handheld’s native 2560 x 1600 display decision — and if I set the sport to the bottom, most potato graphics potential at a pixelated 640 x 480 decision, the perfect I can get is 113fps. Plug within the RTX 5090, and I get 131fps with the graphics at their highest settings. From potato to extremely with one plug — and a mortgage fee.

Not that you simply’d need to play video games that potent on a handheld’s small inner display, in fact — and I noticed one of the best outcomes plugging in an exterior monitor, too, since you lose much less efficiency shuffling information forwards and backwards throughout that Oculink cable. My Name of Obligation body charge went from 131fps on the hand held’s 1600p inner display to 134fps on an exterior 4K monitor. Of our check video games, solely Black Fable: Wukong fell under 60 frames per second at native 4K.

I don’t need to oversell Oculink GPUs an excessive amount of as a result of they’re not solely prepared for primetime, and so they include some main caveats in comparison with Thunderbolt and USB-C tech.

First up, Oculink cables are not hot-swappable like USB merchandise. It’s so tempting to think about enjoying a sport handheld, then plugging it in and resuming with wonderful graphics on an enormous display, however that’s not the truth. It’s a must to shut down your PC each time you join and disconnect or danger harm — the primary time I attempted an Oculink system a yr in the past, I apparently broken its port for good. And earlier than you energy in your PC, it’s important to energy on the eGPU first. (The Minisforum DEG1 I’m utilizing does try to sync with a linked PC and energy on and off on the identical time, however it hasn’t been foolproof for me; the corporate says it’s designed to sync with its personal mini-PCs.)

Second, present Oculink cables themselves aren’t as robustly designed as many USB merchandise. Whereas they’re formed like a smaller DisplayPort, with the identical sort of locking connector, they appear far simpler to by accident dislodge, bend, or break.

Third, Oculink isn’t a single-cable docking answer like Thunderbolt or USB4 as a result of it doesn’t present USB information, audio, or energy to a linked laptop computer: I needed to run a separate USB-C energy wire to the handhelds I examined. That’s a function, not a bug, so there’s nothing to get in the best way of your GPU bandwidth.

Fourth, there merely aren’t all that many units with Oculink. GPD is one devotee, and I examined it working with an early pattern of the Ayaneo 3, however the corporations you’ll discover at your native Greatest Purchase — Asus, Lenovo — are at present placing USB4 ports into their handhelds as an alternative of Oculink.

And fifth, Oculink is at present such an afterthought for corporations like Nvidia that their drivers have apparently been bugged for years. Once I first plugged the 5090 into the GPD Win Max 2 and the Ayaneo 3, they refused to faucet into its energy in any respect till I put in a community-developed “error43” patch that labored like magic. Even so, I noticed a few crashes that I couldn’t pin down.

At this time, potential eGPU patrons have to choose between the diminished bandwidth and compatibility pains of Thunderbolt 4 and USB 4 or the cleaner however less-user-friendly Oculink, however hopefully best-of-both-worlds choices received’t take too lengthy to materialize. Asus has already introduced the primary Thunderbolt 5 eGPU, even when the corporate doesn’t at present have any smaller, weaker PCs with Thunderbolt 5 that would truly benefit from it, and maybe some future 80Gbps USB4 units might supply the identical while not having Intel’s Thunderbolt certification.

Perhaps then, I received’t want a desktop in any respect. I’ll have a handheld gaming PC, and I’ll simply plug it into my eGPU after I get dwelling. Perhaps this might even be the way forward for PC gaming for the plenty — a future for many who don’t need towering desktops — if the trade can simply determine which cable to make use of.