Blackmagic eGPU – Thunderbolt 3 external graphics processor

https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/blackmagicegpu/

by gregpower • 8 years ago

260 271 8 years ago

xxpor2• 8 years ago

I don't know why the title says "Apple's". It works with MBPs but the company seems to have nothing to do with Apple Inc.

scarface743• 8 years ago

Except every comparison on the page is using a MPB, the bottom of the page says “Buy at Apple” and when you click on the link to Apple.com, Apple’s page says “only at Apple”.

xxpor2• 8 years ago

Using "Apple's" is still extremely misleading, and I'm pretty certain Apple's lawyers would not approve.

pvg5• 8 years ago

Designed 'in collaboration with Apple' and sold exclusively by Apple. It's in their FAQ, pop-up right above the 'buy now' button and the price.

ec109685• 8 years ago

Apple worked closely with them according to this article: https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2018/7/12/17563646/a...

united893• 8 years ago

Probably the poster meant to say the Apple partner featured in the new macbook pro promo materials: https://www.apple.com/v/macbook-pro/o/images/overview/perfor...

djsumdog2• 8 years ago

Marketing.

It was either Linus or Dave2D that did some videos on external GPUs and IIRC, all AMDs work on Mac, but only a subset of nvidias do.

Since we are talking about Resolve, which is cross platform, you could just save a bunch of money by buying a PC/Linux box. Several gaming laptops have really good GPUs builtin, although Apple did finally refresh their laptop offerings.

Also keep in mind that if you want to watch video on your laptop screen, you do lose some bandwidth for the image to come back over usbc/thunderbolt (vs external display). If you do a lot of video editing and portability doesn't make you more productive, you can save a decent amount by building or buying a desktop.

siidooloo2• 8 years ago

Running a desktop would be cheaper, but a lot of people have to do stuff remote from a laptop. This thing seems a bit big to be really portable, but some version of an egpu would be great at preventing Resole from melting your laptop.

rsynnott6• 8 years ago

It's a bit like the LG Ultrafine monitors; not actually an Apple product, but sold by, and "blessed by", Apple.

By the way, it's worth noting that that blessing doesn't mean as much as you'd think. The LG Ultrafines have significant quirks that you wouldn't really expect from an Apple thing.

sctb• 8 years ago

Thanks. We've updated the title from “Blackmagic eGPU: Apple's external graphics processor”, which was editorialized and misleading.

jonbaer• 8 years ago

Does anyone here currently run a eGPU on their MacBook Pro and can share their experience (including what card you are using)?

steve19• 8 years ago

I would like to know as well. And if anyone knows if they work well with thunderbolt2.

pvg5• 8 years ago

You take a performance hit even with tb3. Tb2 (for eGPU) is not directly supported by Apple and not really worth it.

callumjones• 8 years ago

I’m playing PUBG on a MB Pro Mid-2015 (integrated graphics only) with a Akitio Node TB3 + nVidia 1060. It worked out of the box on Windows 10.

Yes I’m losing some bandwidth stepping down to TB2 but it’s enough to satisfy some casual gaming.

archagon• 8 years ago

I built a simple, no-hacks-needed TB2 eGPU for Bootcamp use. The caveat is that an external monitor is required, but other than that it's basically 100% reliable: http://archagon.net/blog/2016/12/31/cheap-and-painless-egpu-...

This thing must have extended the life of my laptop by 2-3 years.

cshenton• 8 years ago

If you look up gaming benchmarks. The performance losses make it more economical to build an entire separate computer, at least for that use case.

extralego• 8 years ago

I have been for a couple of years. Mine is an DIY version with a PC power supply. I made it about 3.5 years ago. Last time I checked, I couldn’t use my particular setup for accelerated graphics in MacOS (I could in bootcamped Windows) but I think that works now. I just haven’t done it. I use it mostly for 3D rendering.

It’s an Akitio enclosure, which was the first popular one. I use it with a GTX 980Ti with a little 400 watt power supply on a late 2012 MacBook Pro and it works great. I travel with it and everything.

The performance hit is a lot less than people make it out to be. Mine runs on TB2 and I don’t remember numbers but I have done graphics benchmarks using it in boot camp Windows against the same card in my PC. It was a few FPS different on most tests. I don’t remember exact numbers. For 3D rendering/data processing, there is no performance hit.

raitom• 8 years ago

I’m using an Akitio node 3 with a 1070 on a 2016 15” Macbook Pro. I’m using my mac and macos to work during the day. When I go home, I start windows and plug my egpu to play.

It’s really easy to use on widnows, mostly plug & play. It works so well that I stopped using my old gaming machine.

Main issue though is that you need to plug it to the left thunderbolt 3 port on your mac or the egpu doesn’t work. It also doesn’t work if you plug any other usb-c devices on the right ports. My solution for that is to use a usb-c <-> usb-a hub, plugged on 1 of the 2 usb-c left port, to plug my external ssd and gaming keyboard.

1_player3• 8 years ago

Akitio Node + Apple TB2->3 dongle + GTX 1080 + external LG 4K monitor on a rMBP 15" 2015, used only w/ Bootcamp.

Works pretty well, and my latest addition is a DisplayPort switch to use the iGPU directly with the monitor (when I'm in macOS) or the external GPU (when I'm in Bootcamp). Performance is great, around ~95% of desktop GPU I'd say.

The only issue is that it needs a particular boot sequence to enable it, when switching from macOS to Windows with the GPU enabled: reboot from macOS, turn on the GPU, the default partition is Windows so Windows will boot with the GPU enabled.

To reboot from Windows to macOS, disabling the GPU: reboot from Windows, hold Option at boot to show the boot menu, then turn off the GPU and boot into macOS.

Not that bad once you get used to it, and having a desktop GPU on my laptop makes it all worth it.

My post on /r/eGPU: https://www.reddit.com/r/eGPU/comments/77e86g/success_macboo...

nfriedly• 8 years ago

What DisplayPort switch are you using?

dharma14• 8 years ago

excellent info, thank you. So the Akitio node works ok with GTX 1080/ti? You mention you only use with bootcamp - but do you know if the MacOS drivers Nvidia provides work ok?

pensatoio• 8 years ago

Great info, thank you! Glad to see there's a sub for this too. I'm about to try the same setup.

If it performs well enough, I might just do away with owning a gaming desktop entirely.

Have you tried GSync with your setup?

TN1ck• 8 years ago

I just tried it out and unfortunately it didn't work for my use case. Only certain applications are currently allowed to get accelerated by the eGPU - like Photoshop. I wanted to accelerate WebGL, but it was impossible to make it work. Chrome(ium)/Firefox/Safari, nothing worked. I tried a lot and the browsers showed the eGPU as the card to be used, but it was still the Intel Iris. When someone has any pointers what I made have done wrong, I would be super grateful, but my research was, that it just doesn't work yet.

TheRealDunkirk2• 8 years ago

I have a 2014 MBPr 15". I bought the VR DevKit the day it was released. Running it under the beta of macOS at the time was... wonky. Then they upgraded macOS to support it natively, and it worked exactly like I wanted it to. For about a month.

THEN they upgraded macOS AGAIN, and forced it to stop working on pre-TB3 laptops. It was working GREAT, and they just killed it. Thanks, Apple!

I tried using some dirty hack that someone on some board claimed to work, and got it working again, but after about the 5th kernel panic in 2 days, I ripped out the hack, and sold the damn thing on Ebay. What an enormous waste of time, energy, and money.

It's clear that eGPU's are the future of gaming. I'm eagerly awaiting consensus to align on what that looks like on a MacBook. I just want to play Civ V again, without it looking like a slideshow.

whichdan• 8 years ago

From the FAQ:

Can I upgrade the GPU chip in the Blackmagic eGPU?
No, the design has been optimized for quiet operation so it’s better suited for creative customers. This means the design is not a simple chassis with a PCIe card plugged in, but an integrated electronics, mechanical and cooling design that cannot have the GPU chip upgraded or changed.

$699 and no ability to upgrade makes it pretty clear that they're targeting business customers.

samcat116• 8 years ago

There are tons of other eGPU enclosures on the market that take normal PCIe GPUs. This one is interesting because you can use it with the UltraFine 5k Display which connects via Thunderbolt.

chx3• 8 years ago

Or buy a Dell UP2715K or Philips 275P4VYKEB both of which connect via dual DisplayPort... Heck, even the Iiyama XB2779QQS can be a good candidate for most eGPU -- it requires a DisplayPort 1.4 but that is now a feature of many video cards, it's cheap because it's only 6-bit + A-FRC.

pvg5• 8 years ago

They're targeting DaVinci Resolve users. It's not a great deal for gamers and related nerds but there are lots of Apple-compatible enclosures out now. https://egpu.io/ is a good resource.

dharma14• 8 years ago

I'm wondering how much work in Davinci you can do with the AMD ipgu in the new 15" mbpro.. enough to grade 4k raw footage? Or do you need an egpu?

cosmojg• 8 years ago

$699 and no ability to upgrade

Sounds like a perfect fit for the Apple ecosystem.

cozzyd• 8 years ago

They should charge double for something that's 20% thinner but 30% slower.

dmix• 8 years ago

I'd bet 99.9% of people buying PC Laptops never upgrade a single chip... Apple's non-pro lines are likely not much different. Apple largely sacrificed that ability (in a few product lines) in favour of creating some of the thinnest laptops available. I don't remember them ever doing that before Macbook Air, for now reason.

That said, in this case, I don't see what is being gained by not making the GPU swappable or at least accessible (although it might very well still be). I'm assuming they could simply only offer official support for the one it contains but let people do whatever they want with it (which again might be the case in practice, they just aren't announcing it officially).

jonplackett• 8 years ago

Reason Apple make upgrades impossible is so they can charge ridiculous prices for their built in upgrades.

the new mac has a 4TB SSD option for £2800. You can buy a 4TB top of the range samsung SSD for £800.

£2000 profit is a good motivation for sticking stuff down.

coldtea• 8 years ago

Sounds like a perfect fit for the Apple ecosystem.

I've read statistics that most users, business or not, don't update anything, even when the hardware gives them the opportunity.

For businesses it doesn't even make much sense to update: they can just lease or buy new computers and have them as a tax writeoff.

As for most people, they just buy a new PC every 5-6 years (can be 10 years for the less interested in tech), and that's it.

It's a small niche of tinkerers and "power users" (actually power tinkerers -- there are users that do much more important stuff with the computers than them that still don't tinker at all) that ever does upgrade stuff.

Of course that's includes many people in our tech bubble, but you'd be surprised how many programmers don't care for upgrading and tinkering, and just buy a new laptop every so often.

As a programmer myself (CS degree and everything) I know I hate tinkering with hardware with a passion, but I know lots of others that do too. Of course I also know many dev friends and colleagues that do like building custom rigs.

djsumdog2• 8 years ago

Huh. They're targeting ... people who don't know any better?

I want to see rendering benchmarks (both 1080p/2160p) of this vs external Thunderbolt GTX/1060,1070,1080 enclosures (and AMDGPU equivalents). I mean if it works better and you do a lot of video, then yea, go for it. If it's only marginally better, buy something with a real PCIe slot that's upgradable.

Even business customers should not buy this if the benchmarks don't align. Seriously you're hurting everyone, even if you can afford it. Stop that. Planned obsolescent is terrible. Pay more and buy something you can upgrade, fix and repair.

Throwing out electronics after four years hurts the planet.

pvg5• 8 years ago

Their site describes who this is for at great length. I'm not sure where the GP got the 'business customer' idea, it's not accurate.

101km• 8 years ago

Ever been to a place with a fancy receptionist exclusively running Google Calendar in one browser tab taking up less than 35% of a HUGE iMac screen?

A pretty enclosure can be worth more than its contents, just accept it as a piece of furniture.

I'm sure you wouldn't scoff at PC gaming rigs with pretty flashing LED lights after all.

themagician3• 8 years ago

The value in the ability to upgrade is often misperceived as being worth more than it really is. If you buy something mid-to-top range you are really only going to be able to get a single upgrade cycle out of it out (where there is some substantial marginal benefit for the cost) before the rest of the system starts to obsolete itself. If you watch things closely and the tick-tock cycles are aligned then maybe you get two.

It’s a fun hobby. And if you have the cash to spend on always having the best GPU then you probably don’t care that for $1,000 you only get an extra 10 FPS or so.

These days I can’t even remember how old a machine is let alone what GPU it even has. “Why is this box so slow? It’s four years old? Holy shit, when did that happen?”

Even when I had a rig and was reading Tom’s and Anand daily I don’t think I actually ever upgraded a video card twice. Maybe it happened once? The cycles might have been longer back then, but by the time cards had advanced two generations we were moving from AGP 4x to 8X or to PCI-E or multi core whatever. I could easily just go back in time and buy whatever middle of the road Dell lunchbox was available and just replaced the whole thing every year or two and probably saved money for the same performance.

These days I’ll take a non upgradable whatever it is as long as it has a good warranty.

denkmoon• 8 years ago

"Yeah boss I need that $3000.00 laptop"

"and I absolutely need extra graphical horsepower to perform my job"

"but let's get the Razer core and fuck around for days getting it to work instead of buying the one advertised on the apple site because raisins".

sitharus• 8 years ago

Four years ago I bought a desktop gaming PC (I'm normally a Mac user) with the idea that I could upgrade it over the years to keep it current but avoid replacing the whole thing.

Turns out in practice technology changes enough over that time to only leave the case, and perhaps the PSU. The motherboard, CPU, RAM and graphics card are all obsolete now. The SSD can be reused but newer technology is much faster.

I don't know what gets saved by upgrading parts rather than the machine. The same amount of electronics are disposed of (or sold on the second hand market)

rsynnott6• 8 years ago

If it really is quieter than the others, there's a market for that. Quite a lot of eGPU boxes are _very_ noisy.

neya• 8 years ago

I think it's not the best deal, but it's so much better than other jokers in this space, because, the alternative I've found is Razor Core series (https://www.razer.com/sg-en/gaming-laptops/razer-core-v2) which is a joke - $500+ ($750 where I live) and it doesn't even include a GPU in it!

I'm seriously interested if there's some sort of DIY out there wherein you could just buy a bunch of chips from eBay, put together some enclosure yourself and use your own graphics card. That'd be the dream. Any money not spent on enclosures is money well spent on a good GPU.

cupofjoakim• 8 years ago

The best resource for DIY projects in this space seems to be egpu.io. I found their guide kind of helpful: https://egpu.io/build-guides/

jasonjs• 8 years ago

Even before the more polished products existed, people have hacked together external GPU enclosures, often interfaced to the host's PCIe bus via ExpressCard slots or ribbon cables hanging off of Mini PCIe slots. And more recently, with the interest in cramming many dual-slot GPUs onto a single motherboard for cryptomining rigs, you can find cheap, "barebones stand-alone PCIe slots" (for lack of a better term) for hanging GPUs off of. A quick search turned up a couple of examples:

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Mini-PCI-E-to-PCI-E-1X-Expan...

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/60CM-PCI-Express-1X-To-16X-P... (Ingeniously, on this one, they've re-purposed USB 3.0 cables to carry the high-speed PCIe lanes).

garmaine• 8 years ago

Razed has a $300 alternative that is explicitly supported by the Apple ecosystem.

growt• 8 years ago

Here is an overview I think is helpful [1]. The sonnet eGPU-case looks like its the best value for the price. And the gigabyte box on #1 maybe if you like to buy the GPU with the box.

[1] https://egpu.io/external-gpu-buyers-guide-2018/

Shivetya• 8 years ago

http://barefeats.com/ which in the Apple community is known for graphics testing of Apple products and other solutions has done a lot of work with external GPU enclosures.

One vendor (Sonnet) [1] has a 580 solution at 499. B&H has the no GPU unit at 299. So there are options.

[1]https://www.sonnetstore.com/collections/egpu-expansion-syste...

dlevine• 8 years ago

You can use this: (https://www.amazon.com/Akitio-Node-Thunderbolt3-Windows-Comp...)

It costs $250 + GPU.

ekianjo• 8 years ago

No ability to upgrade? Sounds very familiar for every Apple user out there.

gaius• 8 years ago

The upgrade is to swap out the entire unit and plug a new one into your laptop.

pdpi2• 8 years ago

OTOH $699 sounds like a reasonable price for a GPU in that class? You're just trading an internal interface for an external one.

cptskippy2• 8 years ago

Except that the GPU they've got in their should have a retail price of $200-300. So there's a $400 markup for a PSU and usb hub.

rsynnott6• 8 years ago

There's probably a market for an eGPU enclosure which can sit in a shared office without sounding like a small jet engine, though. Some of them are quite noisy.

DonHopkins• 8 years ago

"Creative customers" sounds like some kind of patronizing euphemism.

ibrault2• 8 years ago

In what way? Plenty of designers & photographers I know frequently refer to themselves and peers as "creatives." Creative is being used as a noun in the phrase.

cptskippy2• 8 years ago

It would have been nice if the GPU and active cooling were an upgradable module even if proprietary. There's a $400+ markup for what's effectively a USB hub and PSU.

anentropic2• 8 years ago

"the design has been optimized for quiet operation"

this is important to me, glad to hear it!

everyone4• 8 years ago

I dont get really this.. I have a stock air-cooled asus GTX 970, and for almost all use cases on my PC it is completely silent. The fans only turn on when the card temp goes over a certain value. The only thing that causes this is a modern taxing AAA type game (eg. The witcher 3). And when I'm playing a game like that Ive got my headphones on.

I can be running Unity, visual studio, adobe premier, illustrator, photoshop, discord, trello, github + a million browser tabs and whatnot and it maketh not a peep.

So, unless ure AAA gaming an average of the shelf GPU these days is passively cooled already.

torstenvl2• 8 years ago

I like that it has four USB Type A ports. This would essentially take the place of a Thunderbolt 3 dock for me, which is already $200-$300. I'm considering getting one.

ant6n• 8 years ago

Let's say I plug a bunch of external HDDs on this dock, and I want unplug this all. Do I have to dismount them all one by one?

csomar• 8 years ago

You can unmount it from OS X.

torstenvl2• 8 years ago

Yes I believe so. However, if you have "a bunch" of disks to attached, maybe consider NAS?

_fzslm• 8 years ago

You can unmount them all at once. Select the disks that you want to unmount on your desktop, then press Cmd+E.

dsl2• 8 years ago

The Elgato Thunderbolt Dock comes with a software utility that gives you a "Disconnect Dock" menu bar option, which unmounts and unloads everything in one click.

gtm1260• 8 years ago

You should wait and see what the performance/reliability of these are. In almost every case, the GPU completley uses up the Thunderbolt 3 bandwidth, causing lag / reduced performance of the GPU and peripherals.

plaguuuuuu• 8 years ago

I lost all respect for the product when I saw Beats headphones in the promo photo. It says a lot about the focus for the product.

qaq2• 8 years ago

I think not only beats but the book selection on the shelf was sad too.

KingMob• 8 years ago

I hate to agree, but yeah. Given how people elsewhere in the comments have pointed out how overpriced it is, maybe they know their target market pretty well?

wishinghand• 8 years ago

How does a Radeon Pro 580 compare to an Nvidia 1070 or 1080?

tcfunk• 8 years ago

It's performance is closer to the 1060 (6gb version) from what I understand.

deltron3030• 8 years ago

Depends on the acceleration method and apps used. With nvidia there's a lot of driver magic, and apps that are optimized for their proprietary architecture. Hardware wise, when it comes to raw power or computing cores, they're very similar. AMD might even have an edge in raw power (or what the hardware would be capable of if used optimally).

That's how you can think about Apple and their Metal architecture, they're basically doing the same thing like nvidia, but kind of decouple it from the GPU vendor. They simply go with AMD hardware because it gives them more bang for the buck (they don't need the optimizations because they do it themselves and pass it down to their customers).

For work in the real world creative industries, like CAD or graphic design, many rely on Adobe or Autodesk products, and that's a nvidia stronghold, most Adobe and Autodesk apps are optimized for nvidia cards.

Gaming is coupled with the CAD/VFX ecosystem, and nvidia historically just have a stronger relationship with game studios and VFX companies, that's why game studios and devs tend to optimize for them first.

RcouF1uZ4gsC• 8 years ago

seems similar to the Gygabyte Aorus gaming box

https://www.gigabyte.com/Graphics-Card/GV-N1080IXEB-8GD#kf

Which you can get in the $500 range which has a GTX 1080.

This eGPU is $699 and has a less powerful AMD 580.

RachelF• 8 years ago

A PCIe card with a AMD Radeon RX 580 8GB is $280 from Amazon.

You are paying a lot for the cool looking case, USB hub and PSU.

I would have hoped that they would have put a premium graphics card like a AMD Vega64 or 1080 in to justify the premium price.

qaq2• 8 years ago

you are also paying for thunderbolt 3 dock which is 250-300 standalone

chx3• 8 years ago

nvidia and mac is not the best combo. https://www.amazon.com/GIGABYTE-Gaming-Graphic-Card-GV-RX580... is only 500, almost the same video card, an RX 580.

For Windows, the 1070 / 1080 boxes are better deals, sure, but 1080 box is not 500 but 700. https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E1681493..., even the 1070 is more than 500 https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E1681412...

minimaxir• 8 years ago

The promo photos of the eGPU include the LG UltraFine 5K, which fully saturates the TB3 port it uses.

Are eGPUs compatable with the UltraFine 5K? IIRC they were explicitly excluded from Apple's compatibility in the early days of High Sierra.

(EDIT: Yes, "There’s even a second Thunderbolt 3 connection for connecting high resolution displays such as the LG 5K display which gives you incredible image resolution, contrast and color depth!")

chx3• 8 years ago

So, https://www.gigabyte.com/Graphics-Card/GV-RX580IXEB-8GD#kf this Thunderbolt enclosure from Gigabyte has an RX 580 in it and costs 500 USD (Google for B07CCK527Y). It is not yet tested but it is possible / likely the Vega 56 Nano will work in it once it's more available.

siidooloo2• 8 years ago

Since this is from Blackmagic what might be more interesting is a more expensive version of this with decklink built in. Then you could plug your output monitor straight into it. For a lot of people working in film/video that little extra would turn this into a Mac Pro without a cpu in it.

stephen_g• 8 years ago

Why not just use an UltraStudio via Thunderbolt for that? Especially since both this and a DeckLink/UltraStudio could saturate a single Thunderbolt port alone so you’d want them on separate ports anyway.

kayoone2• 8 years ago

considering that a thunderbolt hub alone is already very expensive and other enclosures are in the ~500 USD range, this is not too bad for a nice looking solution that is well engineered. Imo it lacks performance for the price though.

arendtio3• 8 years ago

Acoustic Performance: ~18dB

I did expect a fanless design by Apple :-/

megy• 8 years ago

It is not by Apple.

arendtio3• 8 years ago

Thanks for the hint, marketing got me :-/

I saw all the nice Apple products and didn't notice that the eGPU is from a completely different company.

puzzlingcaptcha• 8 years ago

Fanless dissipation of 150W TDP? Good luck.

deno2• 8 years ago

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1065085597/airtop2-infe...

arendtio3• 8 years ago

Well, my off-the-shelf RX460 has just half the power but has no problems with it's fanless cooler while being stuck in the same case as my Core i7 (which runs with a fanless cooler too).

So I don't think it is madness to expect a new product to be a bit better than what you could buy everywhere else since nearly two years.

ebikelaw• 8 years ago

How does all of this behave when you have an eGPU and a Thunderbolt-attached storage device? In what order do you install those peripherals? Who loses when the CPU wants access to GPU and storage at the same time?

ryan-allen3• 8 years ago

It's hardly a mid-range GPU. If you have a desktop PC, you can spend that money and get a much higher end GPU for the same price...

Blindedwino• 8 years ago

This is for laptops.

unixhero• 8 years ago

With the elusive Thunderbolt connector.

Pica_soO• 8 years ago

Its understandable- everyone wants their cellphone to complete the journey of the desktop- but the battery is just to bad. Even with a dedicated chip for drawing - open pubg and the batterys power-supply falls like a rock.

What is a game other- then a lightshow- No-Sleep-Bug?

In my opinion, as long as there is demand and physics unaligned, "building it and they will come" will not archive anything.

So why not instead build a miniserver with gfx cards into WiFi and do the computations for AR, VR and games (mostly downstream data) and catch that with a passive WiFi-Reciever? It is still video displaying - but it does not come with the usual computational burden.

I know, that is a bad architectural choice - away from the expected model, that should batterys get good, would triumph any day now. But if you plan in for that eventuality - you can still program architecturally near neutral and you could walk ahead into the future, not just glimpse it while tied to a charger.

https://passivewifi.cs.washington.edu/files/passive_wifi.pdf

https://bib.irb.hr/datoteka/575153.Energy_Consumption_in_And...

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/9934/9551d3ef0e0efc3c54aaab...

forrestthewoods2• 8 years ago

How much latency does it add?

hit8run• 8 years ago

Yeah, would this be feasible for first person shooters where every millisecond counts?

__david__• 8 years ago

If this added even a single millisecond I'd be extremely surprised. I can guarantee any latency this adds is imperceptible.

manigandham• 8 years ago

The video being worked on in the main header image is the recent sci-fi shortfilm "Hyperlight": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Od49AfIS2-U

Seems to be everywhere recently, and judging by the visuals it looks like it was used as a tech demonstration in many cases.

nafizh• 8 years ago

Anyone knows if I can use an nvidia card as an egpu with a macbook pro for machine learning? Any blog post or link will be appreciated.

kogir• 8 years ago

Yep! Using Windows 10 via Boot Camp on a Late 2016 MacBook Pro, Sonnet eGFX Breakaway Box with 550W Power Supply, and Nvidia Titan X Pascal, everything just works.

In macOS, only tears and kernel panics though.

dharma14• 8 years ago

Is that because of Titan X drivers?

forthispurpose• 8 years ago

Latest script from egpu.io helped me get to pretty stable performance with 1080GTX:

https://egpu.io/forums/mac-setup/script-enable-egpu-on-tb1-2...

Slartie2• 8 years ago

I'm wondering why they didn't include a 10Gbps Ethernet port into this thing. They advertise it to professional graphics and video artists - don't these groups usually have to move around quite a lot of huge 3D data, image and video files?

It seems hard to imagine those people to either place all of that stuff exclusively on their new 8k$ MacBookPros with 4TB of SSD space (because even 4TB quickly runs out in that profession, and it makes it hard to work on the same project with other people) or to transfer it over 0,2Gbps (at best) WiFi connections.

bfred_it• 8 years ago

Two reasons: they have 40 Gbps thunderbolts and they love dongles.

dsl2• 8 years ago

Under heavy load eGPU completely saturates the PCIe bandwidth. Razer couldn't even get a USB mouse to not lag in their first eGPU product.

chrischen2• 8 years ago

See also the Gigabyte Aorus GTX 1080 Gaming Box: https://amzn.to/2maZl0a. It's the same price and not only way more powerful than a Radeon 580 but also the size of the eGPU is way smaller.

rvanmil3• 8 years ago

It also makes a lot more noise and looks ridiculous imo.

chrischen2• 8 years ago

It’s so small you can just hide it somewhere.

That mac eGPU looks bigger than a Mac Pro.

Angostura2• 8 years ago

I'm understand why the page is so obsessed with DaVinci Resolve, but does anyone have any insight on how this would work with After Effects or Premier Pro?

hellomrjack• 8 years ago

After Effect and Premier do not scale very well with GPU performance ([0], [1]), having a one at all does make a huge difference but internal GPU in MacBook Pros are good enough.

[0] https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Adobe-After-Effec... [1] https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/GTX-1070-and-GTX-...

Angostura2• 8 years ago

Why is hellomrjack's reply below marked dead - anyone know? seems a useful reply and an innocuous account.

Although, in reply to him, this late 2013 iMac with NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M 1024 MB certainly struggles to playback edits in real time.

stfwn• 8 years ago

Apple disabled eGPU support for Thunderbolt 1 and 2 with macOS 10.13.4 [0]. Of course someone wrote a nifty script to unblock it and enable support for Nvidia GPU's while at it [1], but it's too bad a great upgrade path from slightly older MBP's (up to 2015) is not officially supported.

[0] https://egpu.io/external-gpu-macos-10-13-4-update/

[1] https://egpu.io/forums/mac-setup/script-enable-egpu-on-tb1-2...

TheRealDunkirk2• 8 years ago

I tried the "purge wrangler" script to support a VR DevKit on my 2014 MBPr 15". I immediately started getting kernel panics. On, like, the third day I had it installed, I had 3 panics, and finally just removed it. At least they made it easy to remove; my machine hasn't crashed since. As always, YMMV.

penagwin• 8 years ago

Just thought I'd mention. The game in the "gaming" picture looks like The Last of Us - a PS3/PS4 exclusive. Not sure how they're playing that on a mac lol.

sevanteri• 8 years ago

Looks like Tomb Raider to me

Guillaume86• 8 years ago

It is, The Rise of the Tomb Raider and screenshot comes from here I guess: https://tombraiders.net/stella/images/TR10/large/preview/pre...

Slartie2• 8 years ago

I'm not sure if it is that game, but if it was, they might very well be using the "Remote Play" functionality, which streams the game from the console to a PC or Mac. You'd definitely need a beefy eGPU to decode all those pre-rendered images ;-)

rvanmil3• 8 years ago

Pardon my ignorance, but do I need an external monitor to use this, or can I just plug this into my MacBook Pro and have improved graphics performance on the built-in display?

saagarjha3• 8 years ago

It works without an external display as well.

rvanmil3• 8 years ago

Thanks, I investigated a bit more since this doesn't seem obvious (to me) reading the egpu product pages or reviews. This is what I found: https://github.com/mayankk2308/set-egpu so it doesn't look like things currently just work out of the box?

nottorp3• 8 years ago

Does it? Because i remember it worked during the betas but then Apple disabled support for the internal display... which made the GPU somewhat useless. Did they fix that lately?

Note: it works if you install Windows is also useless to me. Does it work with the internal display with OS X?

fcarraldo• 8 years ago

This is false. You can hack support for internal display acceleration, but it requires using a "Phantom" display dongle adapter and results in significantly worse performance because of the limited bandwidth available.

gargravarr3• 8 years ago

This is the #1 question that has been bothering me since I heard about eGPUs.

mikhailt2• 8 years ago

eGPU support is opt-in on macOS. Games and apps must enable support for eGPU to use it, regardless of external or internal display.

Here's a video of it in action with one of the first software that supports eGPU acceleration, DaVinci Resolve: https://9to5mac.com/2018/04/19/macos-egpu-performance-test-d...

d--b• 8 years ago

Did they use another company to build this? The design looks very different from Apple's basic line.

EDIT: oh, blackmagic IS a separate company...

ratsimihah2• 8 years ago

An Nvidia GPU with CUDA would've been nice...

phonebucket2• 8 years ago

Would definitely have been nice.

But if you're thinking about scientific programming, it's not so much effort to use AWS GPUs. I do that, and don't think I would buy an eGPU even if it was CUDA capable.

ratsimihah2• 8 years ago

Isn't AWS expensive in the long term? I want to have a 1080 Ti but I don't even have a desktop to begin with.

wslh• 8 years ago

Does this work for any Thunderbolt supporting notebook like the XPS 13?

keymone• 8 years ago

it cost me roughly $600 to build diy egpu. happy to see this finally hit the mainstream.

jillesvangurp2• 8 years ago

I kind of like where this is going. Plug and play performance and less noise.

I'm not really interested in dropping thousands of euros on the latest gaming hardware. I'm not in the pointlessly blinking leds equipped PC market. And I'm done building my own PC after having to replace the power supply in my last effort three times.

I do tend to have up to date mac hw. For me the whole point of that is buying one and then using it for 4-6 years. I actually have the MBP 15" from last year with 16GB. It's not great for gaming though. My four year old imac 5k still gets better framerates in things like x-plane. Both have the issue that they run quite hot when doing anything 3D and cpu intensive. My imac needs to emulate a vacuum cleaner just to keep it from throttling cpu and gpu.

My imac 5k is coming up for replacement somewhere in the next two years. I'm probably going to drop around 3-4K on whatever replaces it. I'd totally consider something with an external GPU. I actually like the form factor but would spend money on an external GPU for casual gaming and VR.

I'd prefer something that focuses on just cpu/memory/ssd and then plug in storage and gpu via some cables. So, this is going the right way.

Apple should focus the next mac pro around this concept. They tried with the previous one but then messed up by soldering the GPU in, which turned out a deal breaker since the whole point of mac pros is 3d graphics. So, simply ship something with plenty of ports and CPU sockets and sell GPU, Storage, screens, etc. separately. CPUs are barely evolving anyway. I got about a 35% build speed improvement by replacing a late 2011 MBP with a late 2017 one. Both were quad core i7s. Seriously underwhelming. And yes, I max out 4 cores with my builds.

binaryblitz• 8 years ago

I'm not really interested in dropping thousands of euros on the latest gaming hardware.
I'm probably going to drop around 3-4K on whatever replaces it.

...

jillesvangurp2• 8 years ago

I'm not doing this for gaming though and what I buy is not optimized for games but for comfort, looks, and I just like running OS X.

So spending 600$ to actually be able to play games and plug in some vr kit, sounds very reasonable to me.

Zephyreks5• 8 years ago

Sounds like you bought the cheapest underpowered PSU on the market. Buy EVGA, and buy more than your system will ever consume. You don't want to cheap out on the thing powering everything else.

Just copy a build off of Reddit or pcper. You don't need to think, just click buy!

slics• 8 years ago

Let’s see: MacbookPro 15 with dedicated Video Card $2500 + $700 Blackmagic + other dongles + a new bag to carry all that ( search Apple dongles video on YouTube just for a laugh) I think we get the point. More is better, and I don’t mean more materialistic items, I mean as in spend more $. Not pointing the obvious but come on Apple, make a damn gaming laptop already.

scarface743• 8 years ago

You're no more expected to carry around the eGPU than the two external monitors that many developers have.

c12• 8 years ago

Interesting technology, shame that it looks ridiculous.

g051051• 8 years ago

How do these people have such huge, clean desks? Anyone I know would have it buried in paper and junk.

ctvo2• 8 years ago

- Radeon Pro 580 - 300 USD

- USB Hub / Thunderbolt 3 Hub - 100 USD

- eGPU - 300 USD (Akitio Node, others)

It's reasonably priced given the components. If it only had upgradability, it'd be very nice, but it's not a dealbreaker.

closetohome2• 8 years ago

If you ever see a Thunderbolt 3 hub for $100 let me know!

ctvo2• 8 years ago

You're right. It's a large distinction. I was thinking of USB-C hub (this one specifically: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/hypershop/hyperdrive-us...) and it only supports 5Gb/s vs. 40Gb/s

Keyframe2• 8 years ago

Beware of anything from that company. Their hardware build quality is notoriously shit. So much so that we've blacklisted their stuff from production, and I know we aren't the only ones.

jason_slack2• 8 years ago

Can you back these claims up at all? Without some claims why should people believe your words at face value?

Keyframe2• 8 years ago

Because I say so - it is anecdotal, of course! Take it what you want from it. Over the years, almost every product they've made and that got into my hands (not by choice) broke in one way or the other or was unusable in production over any longer period of time due to build quality, qc issues or abysmal software. It's why they can get lower price than their competition (Aja or BlueFish for example) which don't suffer from same issues. It's a 'known' issue with them around the TV and Film industry, hence why no one serious is using their stuff, unless they are on a strict budgetary diet. Quality is extremely random and support is next to non-existent apart from what they give you in form of Q&A and software downloads on their site. It's so bad that even their higher-priced hardware gets you almost none support. It's a crap company that is interested in volume.

everyone4• 8 years ago

This is quite amusing. In order to make your sleek macbook suffice for the purposes or real work.. You need to hook up this massive brick.

d35007• 8 years ago

Oh look, the trolls came out to play

jason_slack2• 8 years ago

I just ordered a eGFX Breakaway Box 550 Bundle (with Radeon RX Vega 56 Card) for $819.

https://www.sonnetstore.com/collections/egpu-expansion-syste...

How does the Radeon Pro 580 compare to the Vega 56?

Edit: I just ordered a OWC Thunderbolt 3 dock and it looks like this eGPU has all the ports I need on the back. The dock was like $300 alone.

talldan2• 8 years ago

EGPUs sounds great on paper. A graphics card that I can use easily with either my macbook or windows desktop. I really think that could be an exciting way to prolong the life of old hardware or to get decent gaming performance out of non-gaming hardware.

At the moment, unless you're Windows only, the reality is a bit rougher. Although there are some pretty compelling enclosures out there (Node Pro, Mantiz Venus, Sonnet Breakaway), with Apple not supporting Nvidia (the only GPUs worth getting at the top-end) it's probably not worth it. Sure you can get it working with some hacks, but I personally wouldn't want to spend that much money to be reliant on 3rd party scripts.

Eventually the picture may change, AMD might release a competitive GPU, or the support on MacOS might open up. As soon as the software support is there I think this becomes a really compelling idea and it'll only become more so as the years go by and thunderbolt 3 becomes more widespread.

MITHxyz• 8 years ago

can i use two of these at the same time?

Blackmagic eGPU – Thunderbolt 3 external graphics processor

Related Stories