eGPU and FCP X Question

[Gazember]

I have accidentally killed my MacPro with an improperly seated PCI card. So moving on...

I still have my MBP 2012 and decided to go the eGPU route since High Sierra now supports it. I took the Sapphire RX580 out of the MacPro and installed it in an Akitio Node TB3. This setup requires the Apple TB2 to TB3 to make work so I admit this is an iffy approach, but this is what I can afford right now.

And it all seems to work surprisingly well, no strange artifacts whatsoever. Benchmarks are stellar, about an 18 fold improvement in OpenCL performance using Geekbench. However, I don’t think FCP X is using the external GPU. When running then BruceX test project I do not see much GPU activity in iStat, and it still takes 90 seconds to render the project to a file.

Does anyone have an idea why FCP keeps using the internal GPU and how to make it use the eGPU?

Thanks

 

[PBG4 Dude]

Has Apple added eGPU support to FCP-X yet? It is my understanding that eGPU support is in beta and Apple has so far only released beta eGPU test units to registered developers.

I’m only guessing here, but FCP probably won’t be updated to work with eGPUs until Apple releases their official eGPU solution.

 

[hwojtek]

I don't think the eGPU needs to be specially "supported" by any app, High Sierra takes care of it and presents the card to the app...

 

[PBG4 Dude]

I don't think the eGPU needs to be specially "supported" by any app, High Sierra takes care of it and presents the card to the app...

May have been broken by the latest FCP-X update, according to another forum:

https://egpu.io/forums/pro-applications/new-fcpx-10-4-and-egpu/

I can confirm these findings, running a late 2016 MacBook Pro 15″ with a Radeon RX 460 460 DGPU, with a Sonnet 550 box and a Vega 56 card. I am running 10.13.3 beta 1.

The same exact findings as Michael; FCPX 10.4 eGPU is no longer used for background renders or exports, only playback. It breaks eGPU support. Beware.

ETA: Video covering eGPU issues:

 

[Gazember]

Thanks Dude,

I have similar experiences to those posters in that timeline operations are accelerated, but eGPU is not used for rendering/encoding. This not a problem for me as an amateur video editor. I can wait an hour to render a large project, but I am really worried that any or all of this will break with an OS update.

It is rather interesting that TB3 computers also do not utilize eGPU rendering, but as I recall 2016 and newer laptops have a hardware encoder that works pretty darn well.

Let’s hope that at some point Apple hardware, macOS and FCP will be all be in sync and I can focus on what I want to do. This reminds me of the good old early Windows days...

 

[hwojtek]

May have been broken by the latest FCP-X update, according to another forum:

https://egpu.io/forums/pro-applications/new-fcpx-10-4-and-egpu/

Oh, I see now. Weird, I thought eGPU support was much more OS-bound.

 

[antoine69]

if you stick to FCPX 10.3.4, eGPU in HS works great.