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eGPU support in High Sierra officially announced

SoyCapitanSoyCapitan

SoyCapitanSoyCapitan

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Jul 4, 2015
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eGPU support is now official in High Sierra and it looks like desktop AMD cards will be natively supported too. RX580 is supported in beta already. So yes, when we saw the Apple loading screen start to work in Sierra without any EFI firmware - the reason was because Apple was building support for 3rd party and external GPUs.

Metal 2 is now used to accelerate the Windows Server and H.265 video.

2010 Mac Pro is still supported so if anyone has a Polaris desktop card they will be able to tell us today/soon if it works in High Sierra without modifications.

And as I type...here comes the sneak peak of the new Mac Pro...

It's an iMac Pro just like I said it would be 2 months ago :)

sell $btc
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I'm really excited about the eGPU possibilities. I am ok w/ jettisoning the modular mac pro as along as I have video cards (yes, it's just for gaming ;))
 
AMD stock shooting up on the news. Demand was already very high from Ethereum miners so Apple is lucky to score such a big contract.
 
Glad eGPU is going to be official - hopefully hotplugging support will be in the future.
 
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Vega is in the new iMac Pro... so Vega support + eGPU support = yummy goodness for my 2010 Mac Pro.

And 2010 Mac Pro still fully supported.

Great news for me, made my day! Can't wait until people start testing out new upcomming Vega cards.

Oh... boot screen support ? That's the cherry on top of my cake. Totally unexpected. Yippeeeee!
 
OEMPT said:
Vega is in the new iMac Pro... so Vega support + eGPU support = yummy goodness for my 2010 Mac Pro.

And 2010 Mac Pro still fully supported.

Great news for me, made my day! Can't wait until people start testing out new upcomming Vega cards.

Oh... boot screen support ? That's the cherry on top of my cake. Totally unexpected. Yippeeeee!
Click to expand...

Are you saying regular pc vega cards will have boot screen?
 
This is wonderful news! All Thunderbolt Macs should be able to make use of external graphics. The Sonnet Breakaway Box has enough room for R9 Fury X liquid cooler.

sonnet-breakaway-rx-580-egpu-mac-pro.jpg
z170x-sonnet-breakaway-r9-fury-x-egpu.jpg
 
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theitsage said:
This is wonderful news! All Thunderbolt Macs should be able to make use of external graphics. The Sonnet Breakaway Box has enough room for R9 Fury X liquid cooler.

View attachment 702228
View attachment 702229
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Should also mean I can get a GPU and storage for my MBP in an external tower without using any hacks or scripts.

Wouldn't multi GPU tower be a nice project? :)
 
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mattspace said:
that isn't *the* mac pro, it's the iMac Pro they explicitly said they'd be doing during their special chat with their pet tech bloggers, as a stopgap while they build the next mac pro.
Click to expand...
Yup. In addition, the coming "full" Mac Pro has now been officially announced (I'm pretty sure that it was never actually mentioned on Apple's site until now):

In addition to the new iMac Pro, Apple is working on a completely redesigned, next-generation Mac Pro architected for pro customers who need the highest-end, high-throughput system in a modular design, as well as a new high-end pro display.
Click to expand...
 
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It's great that official eGPU support is coming to macOS, it would be even better if Apple would un-cripple the TB drivers in Windows 10 for the nMP so I could use my eGPU in Windows 10 with my nMP.

I've pretty much written off my nMP as being a viable long-term Mac at this point and will likely list it for sale next week.
 
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Is a Mac Pro really as important as it used to be with this new iMac? Graphic cards will be upgradable through external enclosures...you typically don't upgrade CPU's on machine's and if you do it's a long time down the road and you'll probably want new hardware anyway. Only thing you still need upgradeable is RAM...idk if the new iMac pro has that ability though?

Storage is though thunderbolt enclosures.
 
fenderbass146 said:
Is a Mac Pro really as important as it used to be with this new iMac? Graphic cards will be upgradable through external enclosures...you typically don't upgrade CPU's on machine's and if you do it's a long time down the road and you'll probably want new hardware anyway. Only thing you still need upgradeable is RAM...idk if the new iMac pro has that ability though?

Storage is though thunderbolt enclosures.
Click to expand...

I have zero need for a 5K display being attached to my computer, it's unnecessary for me and adds bulk and cost. Why should I have to buy a 27" iMac Pro to get good graphics and connect it to my 34" display? Just give me a proper desktop chassis.
 
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I wonder if Pascal support will be native in High Sierra. I know there aren't any Macs with 10-series graphics, but now that eGPU is officially supported it'd be nice to not lose acceleration when web drivers don't target the specific build of the OS.
 
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DougTheImpaler said:
I wonder if Pascal support will be native in High Sierra. I know there aren't any Macs with 10-series graphics, but now that eGPU is officially supported it'd be nice to not lose acceleration when web drivers don't target the specific build of the OS.
Click to expand...
No. Apple wouldn't supply drivers for a peripheral or device it doesn't ship. It's a waste of their resources to maintain and support.
 
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SoyCapitanSoyCapitan said:
No. Apple wouldn't supply drivers for a peripheral or device it doesn't ship. It's a waste of their resources to maintain and support.
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Yeah, that sounds likely. I wonder how quickly Nvidia will get to posting drive updates, though.

If I needed to, I guess I could swap the GTX 1070 out for my old GTX 770. Not going to be as fast, but it'd let me experiment with official eGPU support.

I have to think this is the reason we saw an unexpected Pascal web driver in the first place, though.
 
DougTheImpaler said:
Yeah, that sounds likely. I wonder how quickly Nvidia will get to posting drive updates, though.

If I needed to, I guess I could swap the GTX 1070 out for my old GTX 770. Not going to be as fast, but it'd let me experiment with official eGPU support.

I have to think this is the reason we saw an unexpected Pascal web driver in the first place, though.
Click to expand...

Nvidia now has the motivation to hire more people to develop proper drivers. They really shouldn't version lock their drivers to OS version though. It's such a pain. They should treat driver updates the same as Windows.
 
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https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/waiting-for-mac-pro-7-1.1975126/page-192#post-24475479

And specifically this part of this post:

About my previous information, that I was so adamant to keep behind closed doors. I got information that Apple planned a partnership with AMD, and allow them to produce special, made for Mac GPUs. The idea was that Apple planned modular ecosystem. For example, if you had an GPU made for Mac, you would connect it externally, via TB3 cable to any Mac Computer, and allow expanding its capabilities. Way easier from one perspective, problematic from another. Apple is adamant about Efficiency, and that will never change. GPUs made for Mac, were also supposed to have specific limit of power consumed, because that is what Apple usually does.

You could've had for Example Mac Mini, iMac, and Mac Pro, and expand their capabilties, without a problem, through external connection. That was the idea behind it. Vega Architecture was supposed to be the go-to architecture for this, because of its new Memory Paging system, that is less bound by PCIe bandwidth. Right now, I do not know what is going to happen with those plans.

The biggest part of this news, was that Nvidia would also get the ability to develop "Made for Mac" GPUs. They would require however external drivers. Apple was at that point adamant on not using Nvidia GPUs in their computers.



Now think about custom made external GPU cases in which there are soldered GPUs, and you get the idea...
 
SoyCapitanSoyCapitan said:
Nvidia now has the motivation to hire more people to develop proper drivers. They really shouldn't version lock their drivers to OS version though. It's such a pain. They should treat driver updates the same as Windows.
Click to expand...

Blame Apple, not NVIDIA.

https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...out-nvidia-pc-non-efi-graphics-cards.1440150/

27) Why does every security update break the NVIDIA web driver?

NVIDIA provides a set of binary driver components that must interact with a binary interface from the Apple components, both Frameworks like Metal or OpenGL and kernel extensions like IOKit. As far as I can tell, NVIDIA has two options:
  • Tie each driver release to a specific build of the OS, so that they can guarantee that those binary interfaces remain static and thus their binary drivers are compatible. Every time Apple releases a new build of the OS, NVIDIA must release a new build of the drivers to match.
  • Assume that Apple won't change these binary interfaces in a security update and allow one driver build to work with any version of a specific OS release (like 10.12.2). If Apple does change one of these interfaces, the driver would continually crash or cause kernel panics, thus rendering the system basically unusable.
NVIDIA has chosen the first of these two options in order to avoid the huge support burden that would be generated any time Apple changes an interface that their drivers depend on. Having the desktop continually crash or the system go into a kernel panic boot loop can be very difficult to recover from, so NVIDIA has chosen the lesser of two evils and will generally require a new driver build to exactly match the specific OS build that Apple releases to the public.
Click to expand...

If Apple could provide stable binary interfaces like Microsoft does, then NVIDIA could release drivers that worked across multiple OS versions.
[doublepost=1496696289][/doublepost]
koyoot said:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/waiting-for-mac-pro-7-1.1975126/page-192#post-24475479

And specifically this part of this post:

About my previous information, that I was so adamant to keep behind closed doors. I got information that Apple planned a partnership with AMD, and allow them to produce special, made for Mac GPUs. The idea was that Apple planned modular ecosystem. For example, if you had an GPU made for Mac, you would connect it externally, via TB3 cable to any Mac Computer, and allow expanding its capabilities. Way easier from one perspective, problematic from another. Apple is adamant about Efficiency, and that will never change. GPUs made for Mac, were also supposed to have specific limit of power consumed, because that is what Apple usually does.

You could've had for Example Mac Mini, iMac, and Mac Pro, and expand their capabilties, without a problem, through external connection. That was the idea behind it. Vega Architecture was supposed to be the go-to architecture for this, because of its new Memory Paging system, that is less bound by PCIe bandwidth. Right now, I do not know what is going to happen with those plans.

The biggest part of this news, was that Nvidia would also get the ability to develop "Made for Mac" GPUs. They would require however external drivers. Apple was at that point adamant on not using Nvidia GPUs in their computers.



Now think about custom made external GPU cases in which there are soldered GPUs, and you get the idea...
Click to expand...

If an eGPU enclosure has a soldered GPU, it completely defeats the purpose of the product and is essentially useless and misses the point. People need/want PCIe slots so they can upgrade their computers with off-the-shelf graphics cards.
 
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Asgorath said:
If Apple could provide stable binary interfaces like Microsoft does, then NVIDIA could release drivers that worked across multiple OS versions.
Click to expand...
If Apple had stable binary interfaces, then they couldn't randomly make systems obsolete and force you to buy new systems.
 
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