A developer has paired an M5 Max MacBook Pro with an Nvidia RTX 5090 via a Thunderbolt eGPU dock to run Cyberpunk 2077 at over 100 FPS. The setup required virtualization with Linux and the FEX translation layer, along with multiple tweaks.
Setup required virtualization and FEX translation
The M5 Max MacBook Pro used an external RTX 5090 graphics card connected through Thunderbolt. The FEX translation layer, which allows x86 code to run on ARM, incurs roughly a 50% performance penalty on the CPU. Without frame generation, the game runs at just above 60 FPS on the M5 Max and below 50 FPS on an M4 MacBook Air.
The performance figures come from Scott J. Goldman, who tested the configuration. Tom's Hardware reported on the benchmark results.
Apple has not officially confirmed any plans for eGPU support or gaming performance targets for the M5 Max MacBook Pro.
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