Pineboards Gets a Raspberry Pi Driving a High-Performance AMD Graphics Card for 4k Gaming

Getting a powerful external graphics card working with a Raspberry Pi 5 is now easier than ever, with accessory maker Pineboards proving it with a gaming demonstration — something the company says anyone could do "in an hour," given adequate documentation.

"Got it working," the company announced this week, in a post brought to our attention by Adafruit. "SuperTuxCart working in 4k on a Rasbperry Pi 5 without any problems through an external AMD GPU [Graphics Processing Unit]. [Jeff Geerling,] it seems things have improved since your video last year, it was a very simple setup for us.

The call-out to YouTuber Geerling refers to his work on attempting exactly the same trick, initially with a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 (CM4) and later with a Raspberry Pi 5: using the devices' exposed PCI Express connectivity to drive a powerful external graphics card, in place of using the integrated GPU in their respective systems-on-chips. Those efforts, though, proved tricky, initially ending in near failure and even later successes being couched in a wealth of caveats.

Now, though, Pineboards says things have improved dramatically — to the point where anyone could add an external GPU to their Raspberry Pi 5 in an hour, using only the company's Hat uPCIty Lite add-on board and a suitable power supply. "We simply applied some slight driver fixes that were made by Coreforge on GitHub and rebased them onto a slightly newer kernel," the company explains.

"There is not much else other than tinkering a little bit, PCIe support on the Pi 5 has improved significantly, Jeff did his testing in November and more things just work right now. With a properly written tutorial anyone can get this running in an hour now, it’s impressive how things have changed in the last few months."

The company has said it may document the process in more detail on its website "in the upcoming weeks," though not until after it has demonstrated the build in-person at Maker Faire Hannover. More information is available on Pineboards' Twitter thread.