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eGPU

panther007

panther007

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Aug 15, 2004
6
1
Japan
I've got a Mac Mini 2018 i5 32GB connecting with a 55” LG OLED TV.

Some UHD movies are stalling/stopping not constantly playing on VLC or MKPlayer.

Will an eGPU help me out if I buy it?
 
I recommend MPV, it plays 4k great even over the network https://mpv.io

EDIT: I just tested IINA and it had audio sync issues and dropped frames on a 50GB 4k file over my network, while MPV was completely smooth.
 
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Success or failure over a network can come down to cache size, a setting often easily changed, more than raw render ability.

For comparisons, I like to test:

Internal drive copy

Network default cache

Network enhanced cache*


If a player needs so much cache to run smoothly that you can feel the delay at start, it’s ‘score’ goes down.
 
panther007 said:
I've got a Mac Mini 2018 i5 32GB connecting with a 55” LG OLED TV.

Some UHD movies are stalling/stopping not constantly playing on VLC or MKPlayer.

Will an eGPU help me out if I buy it?
Click to expand...
depending on the codec for example VLC on a mac only supports hardware acceleration for H.264 so if you're using some other codec it will not help.
if it's H.265 video which lots of UHD stuff is it's very CPU dependent, so a better GPU wont help.


if it was me I would probably start by opening up the statistics (CMD+I) in VLC to see dropped frames as well as open activity monitor while playing the video to see whether the CPU is actually pegging but honestly, an i5 should be fine.

if all your hardware usages are not pegged that 100% but you're still dropping frames I would assume it's the storage medium.
are these videos located on a NAS or external spinning drive? if so maybe move one to internal storage and see if the issue persists when it doesn't you'll know to get a faster external storage solution etc. or to store them internally space permitting.

Of course, you could always buy a eGPU from Apple and return it within the 14 day return policy if it doesnt help but That seems excessive considering I don't think that's the solution to the problem
 
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StellarVixen said:
What's the point of using such monster of a card when it's gonna be significantly bottlenecked by CPU?


Radeon VII is comparable to the RTX 2080 in performance, and the RTX 2080 is getting bottlenecked significantly by i7 in Mac Mini.
Click to expand...

I think that we need to see tests on how the Radeon VII's 16GB of memory performs, including on tasks like video rendering, before coming to conclusions on its usefulness with the Mac mini. Meanwhile, 9 to 5 Mac recently published a video showing the mini and the RTX 2080 in use with four games. I would be very interested in seeing how the mini plus Radeon VII performs with X-Plane:

 
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F-Train said:
I think that we need to see tests on how the Radeon VII's 16GB of memory performs, including on tasks like video rendering, before coming to conclusions on its usefulness with the Mac mini. Meanwhile, 9 to 5 Mac recently published a video showing the mini and the RTX 2080 in use with four games. I would be very interested in seeing how the mini plus Radeon VII performs with X-Plane:

Click to expand...
Yes, and?

Do you see that it can’t pull out 60 FPS@1440p in “Forza Horizon”?


This card shall easily pull out significantly more than 50-55 FPS at that resolution.



 
StellarVixen said:
Yes, and?

Do you see that it can’t pull out 60 FPS@1440p in “Forza Horizon”?


This card shall easily pull out significantly more than 50-55 FPS at that resolution.
Click to expand...

Great job of failing to respond to what I said, starting with my first sentence on 16GB of memory and ending with my specific reference to X-Plane.

The fact is, nobody knows how useful the Radeon VII will be with the mini until it is tested. You may regard that as a radical proposition; others are likely to regard it as blindingly obvious.

In my own case, I want to see tests with Final Cut and DaVinci Resolve, and I am very interested in how it performs, when it comes to simulation, with X-Plane in particular. I fully expect that such tests results will be available, certainly the first two.
 
F-Train said:
Great job of failing to respond to what I said, starting with my first sentence on 16GB of memory and ending with my specific reference to X-Plane.

The fact is, nobody knows how useful the Radeon VII will be with the mini until it is tested. You may regard that as a radical proposition; others are likely to regard it as blindingly obvious.

In my own case, I want to see tests with Final Cut and DaVinci Resolve, and I am very interested in how it performs, when it comes to simulation, with X-Plane in particular. I fully expect that such tests results will be available, certainly the first two.
Click to expand...

Whatever.


I hope that powerful GPUs will be of use for GPU specific stuff. Such as CUDA and OpenCL programs, in my case.


For anything other, this performance is disappointing.
 
StellarVixen said:
What's the point of using such monster of a card when it's gonna be significantly bottlenecked by CPU?


Radeon VII is comparable to the RTX 2080 in performance, and the RTX 2080 is getting bottlenecked significantly by i7 in Mac Mini.
Click to expand...
Are you sure it’s being bottlenecked by the cpu and it’s not just the roughly 20% performance drop/overhead of Thunderbolt 3?

I use a GTX 1080 TI (performance is also on par with the 2080) in a Razer Core X and my benchmark scores in Windows are roughly 20% lower than benchmark scores that I’ve seen in reviews for the same card which falls right in line with the 20% overhead for TB3.
My system is the i7/32GB/512 mini.
(My card is the MSI GTX1080 TI Gaming X 11G.)

When I used the card with my former 2017 MBP 2.9 i7 quad core my score did seem to take a hit because of the CPU and the CPU scores were fairly low.
 
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smbu2000 said:
Are you sure it’s being bottlenecked by the cpu and it’s not just the roughly 20% performance drop/overhead of Thunderbolt 3?

I use a GTX 1080 TI (performance is also on par with the 2080) in a Razer Core X and my benchmark scores in Windows are roughly 20% lower than benchmark scores that I’ve seen in reviews for the same card which falls right in line with the 20% overhead for TB3.
My system is the i7/32GB/512 mini.
(My card is the MSI GTX1080 TI Gaming X 11G.)

When I used the card with my former 2017 MBP 2.9 i7 quad core my score did seem to take a hit because of the CPU and the CPU scores were fairly low.
Click to expand...

The losses are above 20 percent, take a look at the video I posted.
 
StellarVixen said:
Yes, and?

Do you see that it can’t pull out 60 FPS@1440p in “Forza Horizon”?


This card shall easily pull out significantly more than 50-55 FPS at that resolution.



Click to expand...

That benchmark in F-Train’s video was 1440p (3k), not 1440p (2k), you’re comparing apples and oranges. Not to mention it still showed ~60FPS. Saying the Mini’s i7 bottlenecks performance too much to run an RTX2080 is simply untrue in the vast, vast majority of gaming use cases.

The only time losses will be greater than the 15-20% typically seen from TB3 overhead is when you lower the resolution and quality settings significantly to try and achieve much higher frame rates (in the hundreds of FPS), like if you’re playing Counter Strike competitively.
 
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StellarVixen said:
What's the point of using such monster of a card when it's gonna be significantly bottlenecked by CPU?


Radeon VII is comparable to the RTX 2080 in performance, and the RTX 2080 is getting bottlenecked significantly by i7 in Mac Mini.
Click to expand...

Why not? There is a bottleneck, but you're still getting at least 85% performance from the card. It still can be great for a production workflow, and can still be a decent to quality gaming experience for those who dabble.

We all know it's not going to be better than a gaming PC, but that's not why you would have this kind of setup. I happen to have a Sonnet box (with a RX580 currently) and a 6-core 2013 Mac Pro. I've been giving a serious look at the Mac Mini as at least a minor bump with the 4 Thunderbolt 3 ports.
 
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