The Raspberry Pi is a bit of a resourceful computer. Indeed, this little board can do a lot of things for anyone who puts a bit of thought into it. Today, we have the case of videographer Jeff Gerling, who has managed to couple the Raspberry Pi with a dedicated GPU.
Raspberry Pi 5: mount a dedicated GPU, it’s possible, you’ll even be able to play Minecraft or Portal!
One of the big new features of the Pi 5 is support for the PCIe 3.0 protocol rather than PCIe 2.0. This standard enables full support for a recent graphics card… Or at least, not too old, like an AMD RX 460.
Unfortunately, when it comes to connection, there’s no choice but to use a somewhat convoluted solution. The videographer uses an external PCB with a PCIe x16 slot for connecting the graphics card. The PCB also features a 6-pin PCIe power supply. Remember that the motherboard usually supplies 75W of power to the slot in question. Next, an external power supply is required to power the graphics card. Finally, all that’s left to do is connect all this junk to the Pi 5 via the FPC(Flexible Printed Circuit) connector.
In any case, this installation allows you to run a few light games such as Portal or Minecraft. However, from what we learn, Minecraft ran at a relatively limited framerate due to the limited PCIe bandwidth. Although this part is not visible on video, we can see the person launching a few renderings/benchmarks of his connection.
