Top all-time · #17924
Scott's Blog
Personal blog · scottjg.com/postshardwaresystemsgames
Scott's Blog is a personal blog at scottjg.com about hardware, systems and games. Since 2026, 4 different Hacker News readers have linked it 7 times, most often “RTX 5090 and M4 MacBook Air: Implementing PCI Passthrough for Gaming”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-05-05, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (3) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog's post on running games on a Mac with an external GPU through a Linux VM. It is cited in threads about Mac mini and laptop hardware and eGPU performance.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 3 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- RTX 5090 and M4 MacBook Air: Implementing PCI Passthrough for Gaming4 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2026-05-05
What Hacker News says?
Someone actually got an eGPU to pass-through to a Linux VM - with a steep performance penalty anyway. If you are gaming at 4K a 4090 will still be better even with the performance hit. Although obviously this will blow your solar budget! https://scottjg.com/posts/2026-05-05-egpu-mac-gaming/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48137145
Comment linking /posts/2026-05-05-egpu-mac-gaming/
on “New Mac mini, featuring M6 and M5 Pro”Submitted RTX 5090 and M4 MacBook Air: Implementing PCI Passthrough for Gaming as a story · 7 points
HN discussionposted as a sibling to your comment, but you'd likely be interested in https://scottjg.com/posts/2026-05-05-egpu-mac-gaming/
Comment linking /posts/2026-05-05-egpu-mac-gaming/
on “MacBook Pro Rival with the Nvidia Powered Surface Laptop Ultra”Submitted RTX 5090 and Raspberry Pi: Can It Game? as a story · 6 points
HN discussionpeople have gotten this to work (for a sufficiently sketchy definition of work) for linux run in QEMU at least. https://scottjg.com/posts/2026-05-05-egpu-mac-gaming/ in particular, the conclusion of that article is "You can run cyberpunk 2077 on a M4 macbook air w/ a 5090 eGPU".
Comment linking /posts/2026-05-05-egpu-mac-gaming/
on “MacBook Pro Rival with the Nvidia Powered Surface Laptop Ultra”Submitted RTX 5090 and M4 MacBook Air: Can It Game? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted You can plug a Thunderbolt eGPU into a Mac to play games and accelerate AI now as a story · 1 points
HN discussion