Apple Shares Recommended Graphics Cards and Chassis in New eGPU Support Document for macOS High Sierra 10.13.4

[avkills]

Seems like a lot of people are being fussy over the lack of official support for Nvidia GPUs. CUDA drivers are available for macOS. If it’s really that bothersome then why not build a Hackintosh? That’ll way, you’ll be able to install whatever precious Nvidia GPU you want.

You will also get more in terms of customization (heck, even Ryzen CPUs work in macOS).

I have a 1080ti in my hackintosh and it kicks ass. Stomps the **** out of the MacPro trashcans. System wise it is old, i7 4770k, 16GB RAM, so the new iMacs/iMac Pro most definitely beat it on CPU compute. Overall though I bet the 1080ti still eats the AMD in the iMacPro for lunch.

Let us all hope that Apple does not screw the pooch on the "modular" Mac Pro, because if they do I will be sticking with the Hackintosh crowd.

 

[LincolnsiPod]

I'm curious to see if anyone is using eGPU now with a MacBook for light gaming. I'm not a heavy gamer since I already have a PS4 console, but I'd love to play some older Steam games that's been around a couple of years on my MacBook Pro with the settings maxed out (for once).

 

[kingtj]

Yeah.... Thunderbolt really doesn't seem like it's catching on except as a niche connection method for certain Mac usage scenarios. When I bought my 2013 trash-can Mac Pro, new -- I tried to go "all in" on Thunderbolt, buying an external RAID drive enclosure that used it. A couple years later? That enclosure was literally falling apart. The main LCD front panel and circuit board that managed the RAID on it started going bad, and I'd already had to replace several failing cooling fans and a failing power supply in it. I briefly searched for better alternative products, and quickly realized there wasn't a lot to choose from. Thunderbolt, even for these relatively high-end storage towers, just wasn't really gaining much traction.

Looking at it all now? I really think Apple tried to push the standard too soon. Thunderbolt 3 is probably the first incarnation of the standard with enough data bandwidth for it to fully make sense. And by now, it may be too late for it to catch on. Like you say -- the people who DID try to buy into it before all got left behind with the changes to the plugs and dropping of backwards compatibility for things. It's nothing like USB, where even today, you can plug an old USB 1.1 compatible device in to the latest equipment and still expect it to work as good as it ever did.

It's a shame that Apple keeps thunderbolt as a moving target. No one is going to adopt it if they keep coming out with a view version and plugs. Reminds me of FireWire. They kept changing it and there was few manufacturers that supported it.
Try to go down to Best Buy and buy a thunderbolt 2 hard drive. Nope.
Next year when thunderbolt 4 is released with a new plug all those 3 devices will need a dongle and 10.14 will drop support for thunderbolt 3 for newer tech.
That's why sata and USB are so widely available.

 

[Minxy]

Let's be honest, whenever Apple release their next MacBook Pro it will not have a cutting edge graphics card - in fact Macs never do. But the appeal of an eGPU is that you can have a great portable laptop, and also use a eGPU so it can be used with productivity programs and games software to the maximum degree.

So there's no official support for Nvidia graphics cards, but would it be possible to create a driver for these cards? If hackers/developers are able to do it for Hackintoshs is it not the same sort of thing?

 

[imrazor]

Seems like a lot of people are being fussy over the lack of official support for Nvidia GPUs. CUDA drivers are available for macOS. If it’s really that bothersome then why not build a Hackintosh? That’ll way, you’ll be able to install whatever precious Nvidia GPU you want.

You will also get more in terms of customization (heck, even Ryzen CPUs work in macOS).

In my experience, Hackintoshes are glitchy as heck. True, you can build a system more powerful than a comparably priced Mac, but there is the major hassle of initial configuration. And you always have to say a prayer to St. Jobs that the next update won’t brick your Hack.

FWIW, I have heard that Apple is still cheesed with Nvidia over the MBP GTX 860M debacle and thus refuse to ship anything with Nvidia GPUs.

The lack of Thunderbolt 1 & 2 support seems to be more of Apple’s galling attempts to force people to buy new hardware. However there was some speculation that it might be due to technical issues (possibly sleep mode problems from the betas.)

 

[blackcrayon]

It's a shame that Apple keeps thunderbolt as a moving target. No one is going to adopt it if they keep coming out with a view version and plugs. Reminds me of FireWire. They kept changing it and there was few manufacturers that supported it.
Try to go down to Best Buy and buy a thunderbolt 2 hard drive. Nope.
Next year when thunderbolt 4 is released with a new plug all those 3 devices will need a dongle and 10.14 will drop support for thunderbolt 3 for newer tech.
That's why sata and USB are so widely available.

What makes you think Thunderbolt 4 will have a new plug? 2 didn't coming from 1.
And the fact that TB 3 uses a USB-C port opens up a huge amount of potential that can plug into that one type of port. And I think 2019 is too early for Thunderbolt 4 anyway.
[doublepost=1522538141][/doublepost]

Not on 10.13.14 it doesn't. It will kill any functionality you have now.


not on 10.13.4. It used to on 10.13.3 and earlier.
[doublepost=1522516708][/doublepost]
NO it does not. 10.13.4 will kill any functionality you have. Your solution works ONLY on 10.13.3 and earlier.

I'm pissed as I have an EGPU setup right now that works great and I am stuck on 10.13.3 for the time being
[doublepost=1522516773][/doublepost]
well some people use gpus for things other than games
[doublepost=1522516848][/doublepost]
Exactly.

Its unnerving.

However, I have read that a TB2 enclosure with the adapter can work on TB3 machines still
[doublepost=1522516892][/doublepost]
You should be able to have it work on 10.13.3 as well. That is how I am running my setup on my 2012 mbp
[doublepost=1522516930][/doublepost]
Yes, it kill the unofficial support
[doublepost=1522516988][/doublepost]
Not for 10.13.4! this update kills any functionality that had existed prior.
[doublepost=1522517072][/doublepost]
That is the hope. I have quite the expensive workflow that offing Apple just killed for NO reason
[doublepost=1522517157][/doublepost]
Especially since it was working in 10.13.3 and earlier

This will be made to work in a week or two, we know Apple doesn't like "unofficial support" but I doubt there is anything ultra aggressive in there preventing it from working past a simple patch.

 

[fairuz]

It's a shame that Apple keeps thunderbolt as a moving target. No one is going to adopt it if they keep coming out with a view version and plugs. Reminds me of FireWire. They kept changing it and there was few manufacturers that supported it.
Try to go down to Best Buy and buy a thunderbolt 2 hard drive. Nope.
Next year when thunderbolt 4 is released with a new plug all those 3 devices will need a dongle and 10.14 will drop support for thunderbolt 3 for newer tech.
That's why sata and USB are so widely available.

That's why I'm holding off on buying a new rMBP and why I put my GPU in a custom built desktop instead of messing with eGPUs. USB-C is also shifty because of the different protocols that use the same connector. Even the 2015 rMBP is problematic because I keep losing the ethernet dongles.

 

[xxDEATHTRAPZxx]

Even a 1060 Max-Q has about a 70W TDP. The Radeon 560 in the 2017 MacBook Pro is supposed to be 35W. AMD actually has pretty powerful stuff for low wattage applications.

I'll agree with you that the 1060 would be way to power demanding but I think the 1050m would be a good pick, or even the mx150. It would be a good GPU in a 1080p set up but to push a 2880x1800 display it doesn't quite hold.

Batteries take up both physical space and add the most weight of any component.

Batteries do take up a lot of space I agree but thats no excuse to have empty space in the laptop. Rumour has it that they were going to implement teired battery design in the 2017 model but a few last bugs prevented certification so they just stuck with what they had. I wouldn't be surprised if we saw it this year.

Would you work with the company that tells you what you’re going to use or the company that works with you?

If I were Apple in this scenario? I'd have an exclusive partnership with that very company till I'd have enough leverage on them to just drop them if they played their tricks, in turn impacting their marketshare and causing investors to loose faith in them resulting in a mass dump of shares, driving the company to the point where they have no choice but to make GPU's affordable again

 

[Babygotfont]

Errr not really. "whoever is behind". The Khronos Group is behind the OpenCL/GL. The Khronos is basically an umbrella group for a committee of implementers and users. That group includes Apple, Nvidia, and (to a lesser extent) Microsoft.

https://www.khronos.org/members/list Apple, Nvidia are in the Promotoer level of sponsorship. Microsoft is down in the Contributor levels.

So you have folks who have their own proprietary competitors to OpenCL/GL members of the committee that gets to vote and approve of the feature list of the open solutions they are competing with.

Case in point the recent press release for OpenCL 2.2

" ... “By finalizing OpenCL 2.2, Khronos has delivered on its promise to make C++ a first-class kernel language in the OpenCL standard,” said Neil Trevett, OpenCL chair and Khronos president. ..."
https://www.khronos.org/news/press/khronos-releases-opencl-2.2-with-spir-v-1.2

Hmmm, let's go look and see who is Trevett's "day job" employer.....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Trevett " ... Vice president of Mobile Ecosystem,[1] NVIDIA Corporation "

half joking I could say "fox guarding the hen house " at this point.

Honestly, I think the guy probably separates the two as much as he can, but Nvidia (as a whole and especially the CUDA group) doesn't want OpenCL to evolve faster than CUDA. Nvidia has dragged their feet on implementation. I'm not sure they have fully implemented OpenCL 2.0 yet. When Nvidia bought the Portland Compiler group they mothballed some OpenCL aspects of those products ( in favor of surprise CUDA). There were a ton of moves Nvidia made in 2013-2015 timeframe where the company decided to fully monetize CUDA. as strategic area.

Open Standards are a tricky thing. If you try to push for a standard before a critical mass of people are ready for it, then it usually stalls in these committees. There are lots of arguments about corner cases and the focus just isn't there. Too late and most folks have jumped into their own proprietary solutions they are reluctant to let go of. So there is a bit of Goldilock moment where they work well.

OpenGL started out somewhat related to Silicon Graphics backed standard. Not only involved to gatheing a group they were proactively pushing out an implementation the discussion could evolve around.

"openGL next" turned into Vulkan. Similar thing jump started that into motion past getting bogged down in committee. AMD just opened their whole Mantle implementation. "take it and mutate to what is best".

OpenCL didn't work out as well. Partially it was Apple's reaction to AMD and Nvidia wanting to go down the proprietary path with GPGPU. Microsoft was off on the side cooking up something separate on their own as usual. It was late getting started for CUDA had some traction and AMD was somewhat failing around. There was a tight coupling to LLVM (compiler) and Apple largely controlled that too. LLVM was also evolving. At some point it appears that there was kind of a vacuum of leadership as far as implementation. Apple started backpedaling. Nvidia was not in a hurry to get to OpenCL 2.0 ( shared/mapped memory). Mobile GPU vendors didn't really have much of a shared memory problem (since pragmatically all integrated graphics).


I suspect Apple got tired of herding cats and said this is too strategic, so we are doing our own and took up Metal. ( also I think there were some rumblings they didn't like OpenCL getting friendly with C++ also. I doubt Apple is the major driver of the LLVM C++ front end. ) Metal is more of a combo of Vulkan and a subset of OpenCL compute concepts narrowed down to primary what Apple needs. No committee means Apple could move fast. Essentially the joined Nvidia and Microsoft with conflicted goals inside of Khronos.




Microsoft is winning on their "desktop" just fine. Apple has enough critical mass to win in there subset also. They have the money and resources to do it. Metal is going to be optimized for iOS and macOS second but overtime it will evolve on both.


[quote ]
It's like the CPU wars except that there's nothing analogous to cross-compiling. It sucks.

There is cross compiling. OpenCL is cranking up the integration with SPIR ( and SYSCL)

https://www.anandtech.com/show/9039/khronos-announces-opencl-21-c-comes-to-opencl

As more platforms pick up Vulkan the compilation tools for OpenCL will improve too.
( Vulkan is a different committee working at a different pace. These two standards are not trying to tightly couple because that brings too many voters together with probably conflicting viewpoints but they aren't 100% decoupled either. )


On the macOS platform I suspect it will continue to lag as long as Apple doesn't help with Vulkan, OpenCL, or OpenGL. I think the neglect they are doing now will bite in the butt later, but for now it is working for them.[/QUOTE]

Dude I just want to know where the on/off switch is located ... that’s it ... where in the hell is my on off switch!!

 

[Solomani]

Can an eGPU be used if I already have a dedicated GPU in my iMac? In this case, my iMac already comes with a (semi-decent for an iMac) 4GB Radeon Pro 560.

 

[Norbs12]

Let me try to take a stab at this.... OMG GUYS NO NVIDIA?
[doublepost=1522555045][/doublepost]How am I doing? WOW... NO NVIDIA, NO THANK YOU!1
[doublepost=1522555098][/doublepost]...Oh it's just not supported out of the box but you can download nvidia drivers... why am I so whiny?

 

[Jack Burton]

Can an eGPU be used if I already have a dedicated GPU in my iMac? In this case, my iMac already comes with a (semi-decent for an iMac) 4GB Radeon Pro 560.

External gpu on iMac won’t drive the internal display. It will drive an external monitor or can just be used for gpu compute tasks.

 

[Michael Goff]

I'll agree with you that the 1060 would be way to power demanding but I think the 1050m would be a good pick, or even the mx150. It would be a good GPU in a 1080p set up but to push a 2880x1800 display it doesn't quite hold.



Batteries do take up a lot of space I agree but thats no excuse to have empty space in the laptop. Rumour has it that they were going to implement teired battery design in the 2017 model but a few last bugs prevented certification so they just stuck with what they had. I wouldn't be surprised if we saw it this year.



If I were Apple in this scenario? I'd have an exclusive partnership with that very company till I'd have enough leverage on them to just drop them if they played their tricks, in turn impacting their marketshare and causing investors to loose faith in them resulting in a mass dump of shares, driving the company to the point where they have no choice but to make GPU's affordable again

Apple will never have that leverage in the desktop space.

 

[PickUrPoison]

External gpu on iMac won’t drive the internal display. It will drive an external monitor or can just be used for gpu compute tasks.

With 10.13.4 an eGPU actually can accelerate the internal display, however the developers of each game/app have to add support for it. No idea how easy or difficult it is to implement that functionality.

 

[jm001]

All this said regarding Nvidia, I have seen and played with a couple of hackintoshes running 10.13.4 and both WITH a current Nvidia card (Geforce GTX 1070 and Geforce GTX 1060). I noticed that there were actual Nvidia drivers for them from Nvidia. The owners told me Nvidia does keep the drivers up to date with minimal delays, so maybe this restriction is only for eGPU setups and there will be Nvidia support for the new Mac Pros.

 

[xxDEATHTRAPZxx]

Apple will never have that leverage in the desktop space.

Look mate i'm not gonna be beating around the bush here, my thesis is the Pro 555-560 not ideal in the pro space.

The fact is you pay ~$3000 for a laptop to only pay another $800 for an EGPU because the dedicated is not ideal

 

[star-affinity]

All this said regarding Nvidia, I have seen and played with a couple of hackintoshes running 10.13.4 and both WITH a current Nvidia card (Geforce GTX 1070 and Geforce GTX 1060). I noticed that there were actual Nvidia drivers for them from Nvidia. The owners told me Nvidia does keep the drivers up to date with minimal delays, so maybe this restriction is only for eGPU setups and there will be Nvidia support for the new Mac Pros.

To my knowledge Nvidia GPUs works with macOS externally (in combination with their Web Driver) it's just not supported by Apple (currently).

 

[avkills]

In my experience, Hackintoshes are glitchy as heck. True, you can build a system more powerful than a comparably priced Mac, but there is the major hassle of initial configuration. And you always have to say a prayer to St. Jobs that the next update won’t brick your Hack.

FWIW, I have heard that Apple is still cheesed with Nvidia over the MBP GTX 860M debacle and thus refuse to ship anything with Nvidia GPUs.

The lack of Thunderbolt 1 & 2 support seems to be more of Apple’s galling attempts to force people to buy new hardware. However there was some speculation that it might be due to technical issues (possibly sleep mode problems from the betas.)

Honestly as far as performance goes, my Hack has been the best Mac I've owned. Over the course of 3-4 years I have only had it brick twice. My initial investment was about $1500, and the first GPU was a nVidia GTX760; which worked out of the box using Apple drivers. The initial system was the Mobo, i7 4770k, 16GB RAM, and a 256GB SSD.

Perhaps my biggest frustration with Apple is the fact that they don't sell a reasonably priced tower anymore. Having invested in a 30" Cinema Display, the only "reasonable" option was the Mac Mini, but those are pathetic when it comes to graphic power.

Thunderbolt 3 isn't quite there yet IMO.

All that being said. If you are afraid of reading, using the Terminal, and building computers, then the hackintosh route is definitely not for you; it isn't for casual users.

But I can assure you that my Hackintosh is not anymore glitchy than Apple's own hardware. And I use high end apps like Adobe Creative Cloud and Lightwave3d on it.

Apple's problem is that they want everything to be thin, and more thin. Apple does not make anything serious for the Pro users anymore. But they DO like making **** tons of money making fanboys buy Dongles.
[doublepost=1522578526][/doublepost]

All this said regarding Nvidia, I have seen and played with a couple of hackintoshes running 10.13.4 and both WITH a current Nvidia card (Geforce GTX 1070 and Geforce GTX 1060). I noticed that there were actual Nvidia drivers for them from Nvidia. The owners told me Nvidia does keep the drivers up to date with minimal delays, so maybe this restriction is only for eGPU setups and there will be Nvidia support for the new Mac Pros.

Yes nVidia is very fast about updating the MacOS drivers when new versions come out; 10.13.3, there were reports of graphic issues, but only on Hackintosh computers pretending to be iMac Pro's. Funny that the 10.13.4 update says it fixed graphic issues with iMac Pro, so perhaps it was Apple's problem and not nVidia's or Hackintosh?

 

[star-affinity]

Honestly as far as performance goes, my Hack has been the best Mac I've owned. Over the course of 3-4 years I have only had it brick twice. My initial investment was about $1500, and the first GPU was a nVidia GTX760; which worked out of the box using Apple drivers. The initial system was the Mobo, i7 4770k, 16GB RAM, and a 256GB SSD.

Perhaps my biggest frustration with Apple is the fact that they don't sell a reasonably priced tower anymore. Having invested in a 30" Cinema Display, the only "reasonable" option was the Mac Mini, but those are pathetic when it comes to graphic power.

Thunderbolt 3 isn't quite there yet IMO.

All that being said. If you are afraid of reading, using the Terminal, and building computers, then the hackintosh route is definitely not for you; it isn't for casual users.

But I can assure you that my Hackintosh is not anymore glitchy than Apple's own hardware. And I use high end apps like Adobe Creative Cloud and Lightwave3d on it.

Apple's problem is that they want everything to be thin, and more thin. Apple does not make anything serious for the Pro users anymore. But they DO like making **** tons of money making fanboys buy Dongles.
[doublepost=1522578526][/doublepost]

Yes nVidia is very fast about updating the MacOS drivers when new versions come out; 10.13.3, there were reports of graphic issues, but only on Hackintosh computers pretending to be iMac Pro's. Funny that the 10.13.4 update says it fixed graphic issues with iMac Pro, so perhaps it was Apple's problem and not nVidia's or Hackintosh?

I agree with you on Hackintosh being very capable "Macs" as long as one can handle the extra work required.

But what is you mean isn't there about Thunderbolt 3? Bandwidth?

Must also say the iMac Pro seens pretty capable and the upcoming modular Mac Pro will probably (hopefully) be even more so. But one can sure wonder what Apple has been doing for several years since many of the other big manufacturers (such as Dell and HP) are able to produce up-to-date and very powerful pro work stations.

Still a big fan of the pre-Darth Vader's trash can Mac Pro (cheese graters).

 

[avkills]

I agree with you on Hackintosh being very capable "Macs" as long as one can handle the extra work required.

But what is you mean isn't there about Thunderbolt 3? Bandwidth?

Must also say the iMac Pro seens pretty capable and the upcoming modular Mac Pro will probably (hopefully) be even more so. But one can sure wonder what Apple has been doing for several years since many of the other big manufacturers (such as Dell and HP) are able to produce up-to-date and very powerful pro work stations.

Still a big fan of the pre-Darth Vader's trash can Mac Pro (cheese graters).

Apple hates rectangular boxes that have no visual style; and they take up too much room.

Ok seriously though, the iMac Pro actually isn't that bad of a kit. And even the price isn't bad. But it is attached to a monitor which Apple wants you to throw away when you upgrade. Whoever came up with the idea of the all in computer (thanks Steve?) was not respectful of the environment or using something until it truly is obsolete. We also do not know how they will fair long term. My initial guess is that they are gimped somehow to allow adequate cooling. Of course by gimped I mean non-MacOS workstations will easily trounce it. I'm sure it is the fastest real Mac built to date.

I still have my gutted G5 case, not sure what I will do with it.

Yes Thunderbolt 3 does not have the bandwidth IMO to be a serious GPU add on. Probably needs to go optical before the bandwidth is good enough.

 

[geromi912]

In terms of FP16 - the Vega frontier blows pretty much any Nvidia consumer card out of the water.

Which is why I actively chose AMD rather than Nvidia.

And in FP64 quadros blows EVERYTHING amd out of the water. Even the “workstation” and “compute” Radeon Pro wx 9100 and Radeon instinct MI25 only have 768 flops, what a ****ing joke! And did I mention there is like 0 ML applications that doesn’t use CUDA?
[doublepost=1522585794][/doublepost]

Apple hates rectangular boxes that have no visual style; and they take up too much room.

Ok seriously though, the iMac Pro actually isn't that bad of a kit. And even the price isn't bad. But it is attached to a monitor which Apple wants you to throw away when you upgrade. Whoever came up with the idea of the all in computer (thanks Steve?) was not respectful of the environment or using something until it truly is obsolete. We also do not know how they will fair long term. My initial guess is that they are gimped somehow to allow adequate cooling. Of course by gimped I mean non-MacOS workstations will easily trounce it. I'm sure it is the fastest real Mac built to date.

I still have my gutted G5 case, not sure what I will do with it.

Yes Thunderbolt 3 does not have the bandwidth IMO to be a serious GPU add on. Probably needs to go optical before the bandwidth is good enough.

Yes the iMac pro IS gimped, the GPUs are just underclocked gaming Radeons (NOT the actual workstation WX9100, Radeon “Pro” my arse), the 8 core cpu is gimped so that people will buy the 10 core (fewer cores with lower boost frequency, really?). And on top of that the whole thing STILL thermal throttles under stress (Linus made a video).

 

[Glockworkorange]

macOS 10.13.4, released to the public yesterday afternoon, introduces official support for eGPUs (external graphics processors) on Thunderbolt 3 Macs. Alongside the release, Apple has published a detailed support document that outlines how eGPU support works and provides graphic card and chassis recommendations for use with your Mac.

One or more eGPUs can be used with the 2016 MacBook Pro and later, the 2017 iMac and later, and the iMac Pro, so long as macOS High Sierra 10.13.4 is installed. Apple has added eGPU support for graphic-intensive operations like using VR headsets, 3D gaming, and developing VR apps.

Apple's support document outlines all supported eGPU configurations, with Apple recommending only AMD Radeon cards. There are no supported Nvidia cards.

It's also worth noting that Apple has eliminated support for some cards that were supported during the beta, such as the AMD RX 560.Apple recommends AMD Polaris, Vega 56, and Vega 64 graphics cards, paired with a specific Thunderbolt 3 chassis. For the AMD Radeon RX 570, RX 580, and Radeon Pro WX 7100 cards (of which Apple recommends the Sapphire Pulse series and the AMD WX series), Apple recommends the following Thunderbolt 3 chassis:

[*]OWC Mercury Helios FX3
[*]PowerColor Devil Box
[*]Sapphire Gear Box
[*]Sonnet eGFX Breakaway Box 350W
[*]Sonnet eGFX Breakaway Box 550W
[*]Sonnet eGFX Breakaway Box 650W

For the AMD Radeon RX Vega 56 cards, Apple recommends the Sapphire Vega 56 and the XFX Vega 56 with the OWC Mercury Helios FX, PowerColor Devil Box, Sonnet eGFX Breakaway Box 550W, or Sonnet eGFX Breakaway Box 650W.

The Sonnet eGFX Breakaway Box 650W is the only chassis recommended for AMD Radeon RX Vega 64, Vega Frontier Edition Air, and Radeon Pro WX 9100 graphics cards, while the only recommended all-in-one eGPU product is the Sonnet Radeon RX 570 eGFX Breakaway Puck.

For the MacBook Pro, eGPUs and accompanying TB3 chassis must be able to provide sufficient power to run the graphics card while also charging the computer. In the case of the 15-inch model, that means the chassis needs to support at least 85W of charging power.

Apple says eGPU support has been designed to accelerate Metal, OpenGL, and OpenCL apps that benefit from more graphics power, and not all apps will support eGPU acceleration. Apple says eGPUs will work with most of the following types of apps:

[*]Pro applications designed to utilize multiple GPUs
[*]3D games, when an external monitor is attached directly to the eGPU
[*]VR applications, when the VR headset is attached directly to the eGPU
[*]Pro applications and 3D games that accelerate the built-in display of an iMac or MacBook Pro. (This capability must be enabled by the application's developer.)

Multiple eGPUs can be used together, but Apple recommends users connect eGPUs directly to the Mac instead of daisy-chaining them through another Thunderbolt device or hub.

macOS High Sierra 10.13.4 does not support eGPUs in Windows using Boot Camp, when the Mac is in macOS Recovery, or when system updates are being installed.

Article Link: Apple Shares Recommended Graphics Cards and Chassis in New eGPU Support Document for macOS High Sierra 10.13.4

Are most people looking to game with these or what?
[doublepost=1522586741][/doublepost]

Does this mean I could play some AAA games (Through Windows) with a GTX 1080ti using my 2016 matchbook pro?

Edit: NM...now Nvidia support

Doesn't look like it will work with Bootcamp anyway

 

[anthorumor]

Does this mean I could play some AAA games (Through Windows) with a GTX 1080ti using my 2016 matchbook pro?

Edit: NM...now Nvidia support

For the price of a box and a 1080ti, you might as well spend a little more then end up with a Ryzen 5 system, with the extra benefit of no throttling due to bandwidth.

 

[star-affinity]

Whoever came up with the idea of the all in computer (thanks Steve?) was not respectful of the environment or using something until it truly is obsolete.

I agree! I can somewhat see the convenience (in some cases) of having the monitor and computer as one, but the disadvantages you mention weighs more I think – I've been arguing the same thing all years.

 

[Glockworkorange]

I agree! I can somewhat see the convenience (in some cases) of having the monitor and computer as one, but the disadvantages you mention weighs more I think – I've been arguing the same thing all years.

Those days, for the most part, are gone. It's sad because the last truly upgradeable Macs, like the pre-2014 mini, pre 2013 pro and pre 2012 MBP, are going to be vintage, retired, obsolete (whatever Apple calls it) and they will be un-servicable and soon the new OS's will not be compatible.