Maker Jeff Geerling has succeeded in getting a high-performance desktop graphics card working on a diminutive Raspberry Pi 5, due to the board’s new PCI Specific connectivity — although warns that driver bugs imply not each characteristic works fairly but.

“My journey testing varied graphics playing cards on the Raspberry Pi started quickly after the Compute Module 4 was launched in 2020. Since then I’ve examined nearly 20 graphics playing cards — with just a little success,” Geerling explains.

“However there have been two roadblocks to getting drivers for even older AMD radeon drivers working effectively: The utmost PCIe Gen 2.0 bandwidth meant use circumstances had been restricted to ‘processing on GPU’ duties like GPU-assisted [and] the BCM2711 SoC [System-on-Chip] used on the CM4 and Pi 4 had some unusual PCI Specific bus quirks that prompted onerous crashes and varied faults in drivers making an attempt to make use of 64-bit reminiscence addresses.”

This time, although, Geerling has had extra success due to the launch of the Raspberry Pi 5 and its user-accessible PCI Specific lane, introduced out to a Versatile Flat Cable (FFC) connector at one finish of the board and primarily designed to interface with high-speed Non-Unstable Reminiscence Specific (NVMe) storage. The brand new Broadcom BCM2712 resolves a few of the points with the older BCM2711, and permits for extra bandwidth than its predecessor — making it attainable to run a contemporary GPU on the Raspberry Pi for show functions, after a style.

“Exterior GPU bring-up on the Pi 5 was a lot sooner since we now know most of the driver quirks are because of previous code assuming an X86 structure,” Geerling explains of the undertaking. “In [my] video I show the Pi 5 displaying [the] Wayfire [desktop compositor] by way of an AMD RX 460 [graphics card], and working no less than a lot of the glmark2 check.”

This is not Geerling’s first try to deliver up PCIe gadgets on a Raspberry Pi. Three years in the past he succeeded in pushing 4.15Gb/s of community bandwidth by way of a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4, and in April final yr confirmed off an AMD Radeon graphics card semi-working on the identical gadget — the one Raspberry Pi, previous to the launch of the Raspberry Pi 5, to characteristic an simply user-accessible PCIe lane.

Geerling’s work builds on that of pseudonymous tinkerer “Coreforge,” who contributed a forked kernel and driver package deal which was in a position to get the GPU up and working on the Arm-based Raspberry Pi — regardless of an absence of official help from AMD. Coreforge additionally shared compatibility particulars for video games together with Valve’s Portal and Portal 2, Minecraft, and a glmark2 benchmark rating of three,441 — however Geerling warns of a variety of bugs which can lead to instability.

Geerling has extra particulars accessible on his web site, whereas progress of the GPU testing may be discovered on his GitHub repository; Geerling’s Raspberry Pi PCIe Database offers particulars on PCIe gadgets which have been examined on the Compute Module 4 and Raspberry Pi 5 thus far, from graphics playing cards to community playing cards and SATA interfaces.