Not being a gamer, I know next to nothing about External Graphics Processing Units, but purchase of a Mac mini has me trying to get up to speed with the basics. I thought that I'd share some resources with those in a similar position.
Apple has a document that tells you what products (cards and enclosures) are supported. It is essential reading: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208544
If you aren't Greek, but Apple's document reads like it, there is help. A few days ago, AnandTech published Best Video Cards for Gaming: Holiday 2018: https://www.anandtech.com/show/12050/best-video-cards
The AnandTech article is a fairly sane introduction to the available products and options. Just ignore all the references to Nvidia (see the Apple document). Also, don't start scanning for Black Friday deals. Among other things, the article explains that external GPUs are typically selling for more than MSRP as a result of the activities of our friends in the cryptocurrency mining business.
There is also a web site called egpu.io that has a brief, but useful, article called State of eGPU for Macs – Mojave 10.14 Update: https://egpu.io/state-of-egpu-for-macs-mojave-10-14-update/.
The same site has a page entitled Best eGPU Enclosures Reviewed - External GPU Buyer's Guide 2018: https://egpu.io/external-gpu-buyers-guide-2018/ It's helpful to understand what the rankings on that page are based on. As I understand it, they represent only the number of enclosures by a given manufacturer that participants in the site's forum are using in builds. With respect to the forum itself, I think that it's fair to say that it is something of a rabbit hole, sort of like threads here about Mac mini thermal issues.
I've decided to consider enclosures first, on which I have come to the following personal conclusions:
- I would like to be able to install a different card in the future;
- I would prefer that the enclosure be smaller than the Arc de Triomphe, which may not be entirely consistent with the thought in the immediately preceding bullet;
- Sound levels less than a firetruck siren two inches from my ear would be nice;
- I don't need it to power anything (they all seem to be designed to power, in whole or in part, a laptop);
- I don't need it to do double duty as a hub;
- I really want to use it with a Thunderbolt 3 cable that is longer than the 0.5 meter cable that they all apparently come with (not needing to power a laptop may be key to a solution here).
On the basic question of what an external GPU will actually do for me, as a user of Final Cut, Motion, Compressor, Lightroom and Photoshop, I have yet to encounter any clear answers. The Apple document referred to above is quite extraordinarily hazy on that question.
Cheers
I do film and video production, have worked for various animation and tv studios, graphics companies, etc.. At work we use a CUDA expander, which holds GPU's but at home I have iMac with eGPUs. I have tested the 1080ti in a Sonnet, and Vega Frontier and RX580.
Right now I have a RX580 in the Blackmagic eGPU and the Vega Frontier in the Sonnet with upgraded Power Supply and fan.
eGPU is very welcome but the whole state of things is very frustrating. CUDA is deff faster than OpenCL for certain things and MacOS eGPU is not really supported. Their are ways to install the drivers, but I had too many kernel panics and say F* THIS. If you are every under the gun on a job or with clients, Nvidia and CUDA is a NO GO. Unless you don't need stability, and like to hack and tinker, maybe its your thing.
I would pick your setup based on what you want to do.
Final Cut Pro X uses AMD Gpu's very well, but also Intel Quick sync. eGPU is just getting worked out, but it will 100% be in Final Cut Pro X.
Motion uses GPU and should use eGPU as well, but Apple doesn't seem to care much about this program anymore, I would consider it pretty low on the Apple Software development list.
Lightroom and Photoshop use a lot of OpenGL and its also made by Adobe, they don't really care that much about production on MacOS, as much as they sell software to do it. If you wanna make adobe faster I would stay in PC, the Metal and OpenCL acceleration of Adobe CC on MacOS is laughable. Doesn't matter if you have an embedded GPU or an eGPU.
I almost exclusively use Blackmagic Davinci Resolve and an eGPU works very well with it.
