I plugged an Nvidia RTX 5090 right into a gaming handheld

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

It made me marvel: 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 marvel to behold. It’s sufficient to make me imagine in a wealthy future the place handhelds get extra highly effective whenever you dock them at house.

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 delivery in a handful of moveable gaming PCs, as long as you carry your individual desktop GPU and energy provide.

I plugged that Oculink cable right into a $1,000 GPD Win Max 2 handheld. And then, with simply an AMD Ryzen 8840U cellular CPU and 4 lanes of PCIe 4.0 bandwidth, relatively 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 Ultra settings. I’m speaking about playable body charges in all essentially the most intensive video games at 4K and near-maximum specs.

Across 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 was solely 4 to 29 p.c slower than that 5090 in my SFF desktop and much sooner than after I caught an RTX 3080 in that desktop. And it was 4 to 12 instances sooner than the hand-held’s Radeon 780M built-in GPU might handle by itself.

Start with the “5090 handheld” column in my desk under:

For instance, my GPD Win Max 2 evaluation unit averages simply 17fps in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 at Extreme spec on the handheld’s native 2560 x 1600 display decision — and if I set the sport to the bottom, most potato graphics doable 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 cost.

Not that you just’d wish to play video games that potent on a handheld’s small inner display, after all — and I noticed the very best outcomes plugging in an exterior monitor, too, since you lose much less efficiency shuffling knowledge forwards and backwards throughout that Oculink cable. My Call of Duty body price 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 Myth: Wukong fell under 60 frames per second at native 4K.

I don’t wish to oversell Oculink GPUs an excessive amount of as a result of they’re not solely prepared for primetime, they usually 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 recreation handheld, then plugging it in and resuming with wonderful graphics on an enormous display, however that’s not the truth. You must shut down your PC each time you join and disconnect or danger harm — the primary time I attempted an Oculink system a 12 months in the past, I apparently broken its port for good. And earlier than you energy in your PC, you must energy on the eGPU first. (The Minisforum DEG1 I’m utilizing does try and sync with a linked PC and energy on and off on the similar time, but it surely 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. While they’re formed like a smaller DisplayPort, with the identical type of locking connector, they appear far simpler to by accident dislodge, bend, or break.

Third, Oculink is just not a single-cable docking resolution like Thunderbolt or USB4 as a result of it doesn’t present USB knowledge, 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 characteristic, not a bug, so there’s nothing to get in the way in which of your GPU bandwidth.

Fourth, there merely aren’t all that many gadgets 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 Best Buy — Asus, Lenovo — are presently placing USB4 ports into their handhelds as an alternative of Oculink.

And fifth, Oculink is presently such an afterthought for corporations like Nvidia that their drivers have apparently been bugged for years. When 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.

Today, 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 presently have any smaller, weaker PCs with Thunderbolt 5 that would really make the most of it, and maybe some future 80Gbps USB4 gadgets might supply the identical while not having Intel’s Thunderbolt certification.

Maybe 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 house. Maybe this might even be the way forward for PC gaming for the lots — a future for individuals who don’t need towering desktops — if the trade can simply determine which cable to make use of.