Raspberry has unveiled the Pi 5, equipped with the Broadcom BCM2712 SoC, which features a quad-core ARM CPU alongside the VideoCore VII GPU. By itself, this single-board computer (SBC) does a decent job of emulating classic games, but it struggles to run contemporary AAA titles at playable frame rates.
Improved Performance with a GPU
The situation improves significantly when the Raspberry Pi 5 is used with a good discrete GPU, like the Radeon RX 6700 XT. Jeff Geerling recently demonstrated that, in this setup, the SBC can handle Doom Eternal, a AAA game from 2020, at 4K resolution. While the frame rates fluctuated quite a bit, reducing the resolution to 1080p allowed the setup to achieve over 30 FPS.
CPU Limitations
According to Geerling, even at the 4K resolution, the GPU was hardly being pushed, whereas the CPU was maxed out. This indicates that the CPU is the limiting factor, suggesting that the Raspberry Pi 5 could have provided better gaming performance if the SoC were slightly more robust.
Capable of Older Titles
On a brighter note, the SBC managed to run older games like Doom 3 from 2004 and SuperTuxKart from 2007 at 4K with 60 FPS, thanks to the support for RX 6000 and RX 7000 GPU drivers that the Raspberry Pi 5 (starter kit available on Amazon) now has.
In addition to gaming, the new Radeon drivers offer hardware video transcoding capabilities. However, support for LLM acceleration is still absent, and Geerling mentions that AMD ROCm won't be available for ARM systems in the near future. He has also tested other titles, including Forza Horizon 4, Crysis Remastered, and Red Dead Redemption 2. The Pi fan even experimented with the Radeon Pro W7700. You can view the results in the video linked below.
Source: Link
