M5 Max MacBook Pro paired with RTX 5090 in an eGPU dock — runs Cyberpunk 2077 at over 100 FPS at max settings with frame generation

M5 Max MacBook Pro paired with RTX 5090 in an eGPU dock — runs Cyberpunk 2077 at over 100 FPS at max settings with frame generation

https://www.tomshardware.com/laptops/macbooks/m5-max-macbook-pro-paired-with-rtx-5090-in-an-egpu-dock-runs-cyberpunk-2077-at-over-100-fps-at-max-settings-with-frame-generation

Publish Date: 2026-05-16 06:40:00

Source Domain: www.tomshardware.com

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.

A few other quirks the software engineer had to address included setting up PCI BAR and enabling DMA (Direct Memory Access). One strange problem Goldman had to fix was a scheduling issue in QEMU where the default settings caused benchmark scores to fluctuate sporadically, due to a configuration issue in which the virtualization app did not set any priority level for the virtual CPU threads.

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Beyond setting up a Linux virtual machine, implementing the FEX translation layer was also necessary to convert x86 instructions into ARM-based instructions that the M4 Max chip can understand. This was necessary as virtually no PC games support ARM.

With this software setup, the software engineer tested his M5 Max MacBook against a couple of other systems paired with an RTX 5090, featuring an older M4 Air, a 2020 Intel-powered Macbook Pro that is critically running Linux natively with no emulation or…

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