Apple’s M5 Max SoC flagship is one of the fastest pieces of silicon around and can compete with flagship consumer desktop chips from AMD and Intel in at least some workloads. Logically, this also makes it a great gaming CPU if paired with high-end GPU hardware. Software engineer Scott J. Goldman put this idea to the test and found a way to run Nvidia’s flagship RTX 5090 graphics card on an M5 Max-powered MacBook Pro using virtualization and an eGPU dock. His results revealed that gaming on an RTX 5090 via a MacBook can deliver a great experience in modern AAA games, as long as frame generation is enabled.
The setup process was anything but easy. ARM-based MacBooks don’t officially support eGPU gaming with Nvidia GPUs, requiring Goldman to make a plethora of tweaks to enable it, most notably through virtualization with a Linux OS. MacOS does not support Nvidia GPUs (there is no native driver support), and Linux does not natively support Thunderbolt on Apple silicon. Virtualization gets around this problem by leveraging the strengths of macOS and Linux.
