#APPLE EGPU NVIDIA PRO#
External GPUs usually don’t actually power the native displays unless a developer specifically allows it, meaning you can’t expect to jack one into your MacBook Pro and see the magic happen right there on the Retina screen.
![apple egpu nvidia apple egpu nvidia](https://www.technomoji.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Mac-Üzerinde-Nvidia-eGPU.jpg)
I’m not really convinced it’s worth around $700 to pick up the chassis and the card we used, but that assessment could change with better (and more expensivse) equipment.įor that matter, the potential costs don’t end there. The value of an eGPUĪgain, though, it’s only kind of worth it. Even with these issues, though, it occasionally made my MacBook Pro feel like a new machine. I’ve also seen reports of eGPUs causing some crashes in some games, but I was fortunate to never see one myself. I also tried our eGPU setup with World of Warcraft and Elder Scrolls Online and was happy to find myself safely pushing the graphics quality to heights I’d never been able to reach on my MacBook Pro’s discrete card. In the games themselves, that extra oomph was more than enough to see some clear improvements. With GFXBench’s Manhattan 3.1 test, though, the RX 580’s 60fps soundly trounced the 555’s 33.8. When I tested Apple’s own Metal API with GFXBench, for instance, both versions of the T-Rex test produced framerates of 59 fps. Sometimes, in fact, benchmarks would produce almost identical results for some tests and then the RX 580 would soar far ahead with others. The new card still wasn’t strong enough to push me past 60 frames per second, though, and the Cinebench results reveal why: In some respects, the Radeon RX 580 is only a tad more powerful than my built-in Radeon Pro 555. I ran benchmarks using both Unigine and Cinebench with the settings cranked to Ultra, and as you can see above, Unigine saw a massive improvement with the OpenGL API. Leif Johnson/IDGīenchmarks from a 15-inch 2017 MacBook Pro using Unigine’s Benchmark Valley on Ultra (fullscreen), both with the eGPU and without. It suggests you may still have trouble with certain made-for-Mac applications even though Apple appears to have designed eGPU support in such a way that official support shouldn’t matter. I’ve asked for further clarification, but Feral’s statement must refer to optimized support as the benchmark tests and general gameplay showed clear improvements when using the eGPU. Eventually Feral will make an announcement regarding official support. Shortly after this article went live, Feral Interactive contacted me to let me know it doesn’t support eGPUs in any of its games at the moment, although the studio is currently testing combinations of cards and GPUs. I’m almost certain I’d be blown away with the results on a $950 Radeon RX Vega 64, but we currently don’t have one.
![apple egpu nvidia apple egpu nvidia](https://bizon-tech.com/skin/frontend/rwd/tech/images/img-mac-with-bizon3.jpg)
And this was only with the Radeon RX 580, a $401 card we had on hand here. Perhaps a different chassis would have helped.īut watching Lara Croft jump from snowy ledges and sneak through desert passages felt natural and fluid with the better graphics card (and better framerates). The Nvidia toolbar icon showed up, but the card itself never worked. I also tried using Nvidia’s web driver that’s partially designed with macOS in mind, thinking I’d hit on a way to make it work. The little processor icon didn’t show up. I plopped an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 into the eGPU chassis, connected it, booted, and nada.
#APPLE EGPU NVIDIA DRIVER#
If you’re wondering, I tried using Nvidia cards, but there’s no built-in driver support.
![apple egpu nvidia apple egpu nvidia](https://photos5.appleinsider.com/gallery/25628-35222-25224-33896-24869-32992-top-mantiz-l-l-xl.jpg)
Here you’ll find your gaming ambitions further thwarted by Apple’s lack of direct support for Nvidia cards. It makes some sense considering that AMD makes most of the graphics cards found in contemporary Macs, but it’s another low blow in a gaming environment where Nvidia cards win mountains of accolades. For those of you who can play with that kind of power, though, let’s move on to the supported cards. Unfortunately, that limitation likely knocks a lot of users out of the game right there. This is a bit of a bummer, but Thunderbolt 3 supports data transfers of up to 40Gbps, while Thunderbolt 2 supports 20Gbps. You can only pull this off without any technical trickery so long as you’re using a MacBook or iMac with Thunderbolt 3 support, which means you’re limited to using laptops dating from 2016 and iMacs dating from mid-2017. It works, that is, so long as you have the right materials. It’s really no different from disconnecting a drive. Apple prides itself on elegant simplicity, and in this case Steve Jobs’ favorite old saying remains true: It just works. (Getting it to work with games takes a few more steps, but more on that later.) Even better, I didn’t even have to restart. Within seconds, an icon resembling a processor popped up on the Mac’s top menu bar, showing that the Radeon RX 580 was, in fact, working.
![apple egpu nvidia apple egpu nvidia](https://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Enthusiast-Kloper-640x353.jpg)
Once I slipped my Radeon RX 580 into an Akitio Node Pro chassis and tightened the screws, all I really needed to do was plug the Thunderbolt 3 cable into my MacBook Pro.