External GPU with 2.9 GHZ i9 2018?!?!

[Editson]

Hey everyone!
I edit on my MacBook Pro but feel like I’m getting hit with thermal throttling.
Will getting an External GPU fix this?

——

MacBook Pro 15 inch, 2018
2.9 GHz 6-core intel core i9
32 fb 2400 MHz DDR4
Radeon pro 560X 4 GB
Intel UHG graphics 630 1536 MB

 

[ilikewhey]

if the app is gpu intensive yes.

 

[casperes1996]

For the future I think it better just to make a single post rather than two; It spreads out responses more rather than keeping all the information in one place where it can easily be referenced.

In any case, having also read your other thread; Why not try and measure things first? For one thing it may very well not be thermal throttling at all, though if you're in any way other than communication bandwidth, GPU limited it could still help, but if you're CPU limited in a thermally fine range it will not.
Try out iStat while you do your work and keep an eye on things

 

[Editson]

For the future I think it better just to make a single post rather than two; It spreads out responses more rather than keeping all the information in one place where it can easily be referenced.

In any case, having also read your other thread; Why not try and measure things first? For one thing it may very well not be thermal throttling at all, though if you're in any way other than communication bandwidth, GPU limited it could still help, but if you're CPU limited in a thermally fine range it will not.
Try out iStat while you do your work and keep an eye on things

Appreciate the comment!

I’m not too tech Savvy but I will try Istay and see what it’s all about. Any tips on testing wouldbe appreciated! I just hate to feel I spent so much on a MacBook and its a dud for my editing purposes

 

[casperes1996]

Appreciate the comment!

I’m not too tech Savvy but I will try Istay and see what it’s all about. Any tips on testing wouldbe appreciated! I just hate to feel I spent so much on a MacBook and its a dud for my editing purposes

Do your regular work, and log CPU and GPU die temperatures, frequencies and utilisation.

What kind of stuff are you editing? For that machine to not keep up seems... Strange

 

[Editson]

Do your regular work, and log CPU and GPU die temperatures, frequencies and utilisation.

What kind of stuff are you editing? For that machine to not keep up seems... Strange

Final Cut Pro X which is strange because it’s so optimized for Mac OSX. It gets really worked up when I get a lot of layers going or when I work with some tracking or animation plugins.

 

[casperes1996]

Final Cut Pro X which is strange because it’s so optimized for Mac OSX. It gets really worked up when I get a lot of layers going or when I work with some tracking or animation plugins.

Right I meant which video codec and type of footage and what you usually do with the footage; So we're looking at compositing layers, tracking and with, what? 4k RED RAW?

 

[Editson]

Right I meant which video codec and type of footage and what you usually do with the footage; So we're looking at compositing layers, tracking and with, what? 4k RED RAW?

Yup... 4k XAVC S 30 100M

 

[casperes1996]

Yup... 4k XAVC S 30 100M

And you don't create "optimised media"? i.e. transcode to ProRes? - I'd try that honestly. Uses extra storage space but is much faster to edit with - If you can deal with the lower quality while editing you could also try proxies or setting the player to Better Performance (Now talking workarounds; Obviously don't do this while you test what your bottleneck is for your normal workflow to see if an eGPU would help, but for editing without one, this might be worth trying out )

 

[Editson]

And you don't create "optimised media"? i.e. transcode to ProRes? - I'd try that honestly. Uses extra storage space but is much faster to edit with - If you can deal with the lower quality while editing you could also try proxies or setting the player to Better Performance (Now talking workarounds; Obviously don't do this while you test what your bottleneck is for your normal workflow to see if an eGPU would help, but for editing without one, this might be worth trying out )

I’ve tried proxies and get the same lag. Haven’t really played too much with optimized but if proxies still have trouble I imagine optimized would too?
Yeah lemme do some editing with the istat and get back to ya.
Thanks do much... it’s been frustrating dealing with this.

 

[casperes1996]

I’ve tried proxies and get the same lag. Haven’t really played too much with optimized but if proxies still have trouble I imagine optimized would too?

Yeah proxies should normally be about 4x easier for the computer to deal with than Optimised Media of the same clip (very rough estimation there) - Weird though. I've seen people edit what should be rougher footage than that on a not too differently spec'd machine very smoothly.

I at the moment only work with 1080p myself, but my 2014 MacBook Pro that doesn't even have a dGPU is dealing alright with that.

Yeah lemme do some editing with the istat and get back to ya.

Alright, cheers - will look at your results when they come in

 

[Editson]

[automerge]1599447693[/automerge]

Yeah proxies should normally be about 4x easier for the computer to deal with than Optimised Media of the same clip (very rough estimation there) - Weird though. I've seen people edit what should be rougher footage than that on a not too differently spec'd machine very smoothly.

I at the moment only work with 1080p myself, but my 2014 MacBook Pro that doesn't even have a dGPU is dealing alright with that.



Alright, cheers - will look at your results when they come in

just loaded up my project and started to go over the section where i have a plugin im working with and this is what happens.

is it supposed to go to 100% immediately?

 

[Editson]

Yeah proxies should normally be about 4x easier for the computer to deal with than Optimised Media of the same clip (very rough estimation there) - Weird though. I've seen people edit what should be rougher footage than that on a not too differently spec'd machine very smoothly.

I at the moment only work with 1080p myself, but my 2014 MacBook Pro that doesn't even have a dGPU is dealing alright with that.



Alright, cheers - will look at your results when they come in

Oh also I get this warning >.<

 

[casperes1996]

[automerge]1599447693[/automerge]


View attachment 950878

just loaded up my project and started to go over the section where i have a plugin im working with and this is what happens.

is it supposed to go to 100% immediately?

Well based on this you’re definitely not thermally throttling. And in fact you‘re neither really looking to be CPU or GPU limited, though it looks like the GPU VRAM is filled - What’s the situation with system memory? In Activity Monitor what’s the memory pressure graph looking like? Green? Yellow? Red?
Are you editing off of the internal SSD or do you edit off of a connected USB/THunderbolt drive?

 

[casperes1996]

Oh also I get this warning >.<

View attachment 950880

I would tick the don’t warn again checkbox personally. If the dropped frames happen I’ll notice on my own and don’t need a workflow interruption to let me know, but that’s just opinion

 

[Editson]

Well based on this you’re definitely not thermally throttling. And in fact you‘re neither really looking to be CPU or GPU limited, though it looks like the GPU VRAM is filled - What’s the situation with system memory? In Activity Monitor what’s the memory pressure graph looking like? Green? Yellow? Red?
Are you editing off of the internal SSD or do you edit off of a connected USB/THunderbolt drive?

editing directly off my internal 2 TB SSD ...

Are you sure I’m not GPU limited? The GPU shoots up to almost 100% as soon as I open FCPX and I’m not even working on it.

Not sure about GPU VRAM (what should I there?
Yes I’ve turned off the warnings, I just wanted to check them off to see what final cut thinks is the problem.

 

[Editson]

Well based on this you’re definitely not thermally throttling. And in fact you‘re neither really looking to be CPU or GPU limited, though it looks like the GPU VRAM is filled - What’s the situation with system memory? In Activity Monitor what’s the memory pressure graph looking like? Green? Yellow? Red?
Are you editing off of the internal SSD or do you edit off of a connected USB/THunderbolt drive?

not sure how to read the pressure graphs but here it is

 

[casperes1996]

View attachment 950973

not sure how to read the pressure graphs but here it is

Well you're clearly not really strained on memory either, other than that the GPU's VRAM was seemingly fully allocated in the last image, but fully allocated doesn't necessarily equate to fully used; But the compositing or something may just be very intense on VRAM; I guess that's a possibility. - But yeah none of these images show that any particular system component is really very stressed or hot

 

[Editson]

Well you're clearly not really strained on memory either, other than that the GPU's VRAM was seemingly fully allocated in the last image, but fully allocated doesn't necessarily equate to fully used; But the compositing or something may just be very intense on VRAM; I guess that's a possibility. - But yeah none of these images show that any particular system component is really very stressed or hot

Hmmm ok.
Is it not a concern that Final Cut Pro is always brings my GPU to 95-100% even when I just have it open?
And if final cut just naturally uses that much GPU... then would an external GPU solve this?

 

[casperes1996]

Hmmm ok.
Is it not a concern that Final Cut Pro is always brings my GPU to 95-100% even when I just have it open?
And if final cut just naturally uses that much GPU... then would an external GPU solve this?

I'm not sure what you mean; In the screenshot you sent earlier the GPU was basically idle and the wattage was only at 22W; The GPU memory was seemingly fully allocated, but the GPU processing was basically at 0

 

[Editson]

I'm not sure what you mean; In the screenshot you sent earlier the GPU was basically idle and the wattage was only at 22W; The GPU memory was seemingly fully allocated, but the GPU processing was basically at 0

its more like this

the gpu says 100% lol

 

[casperes1996]

View attachment 951088

its more like this

the gpu says 100% lol

Based on the sliders below, the 100% in the menu bar refers to the GPU memory; If you look under the GPU section, it shows fairly little in the GPU Processor bar. - And again it's only using 20W - You might benefit from an eGPU with more VRAM, but I am not convinced raw GPU power is an issue really

 

[Editson]

Based on the sliders below, the 100% in the menu bar refers to the GPU memory; If you look under the GPU section, it shows fairly little in the GPU Processor bar. - And again it's only using 20W - You might benefit from an eGPU with more VRAM, but I am not convinced raw GPU power is an issue really

ok let me take screen shot when the frames are actually slipping ... If professor is still medium to low then that would mean the skipping frames is something else?

i Just don’t want skipping frames and the lag I experience haha

 

[casperes1996]

ok let me take screen shot when the frames are actually slipping ... If professor is still medium to low then that would mean the skipping frames is something else?

i Just don’t want skipping frames and the lag I experience haha

Most likely, yeah

But no of course not, it sucks when that happens.

Back on my old 2014 iMac I sometimes had a "fun" situation where optimised media would lag during editing, but the harder-to-edit codecs straight from the camera would be fine; And that was because, while the optimised clips required way less CPU/GPU power to render and edit, they took up a lot more drive space, and I was editing off a spinning hard drive so the time it took to load in the footage from the drive was actually bottlenecking it. The smaller file sizes of the original files took up way more CPU/GPU but was faster to stream in from disk. - At least that's what I assume was the case based on measurements and the experience.

Do you know anyone else doing similar editing with the same media types as you?
Maybe it'd be possible for you to create a tiny mini library that just contains the section that struggles on your machine or a replica with free stock footage or something that also stutters with similar compositing or something and send to me? I'd like to try and see with my new 2020 iMac with the Radeon 5700XT how much VRAM it would allocate, since it's allocating 100% of your VRAM

 

[Editson]

Most likely, yeah

But no of course not, it sucks when that happens.

Back on my old 2014 iMac I sometimes had a "fun" situation where optimised media would lag during editing, but the harder-to-edit codecs straight from the camera would be fine; And that was because, while the optimised clips required way less CPU/GPU power to render and edit, they took up a lot more drive space, and I was editing off a spinning hard drive so the time it took to load in the footage from the drive was actually bottlenecking it. The smaller file sizes of the original files took up way more CPU/GPU but was faster to stream in from disk. - At least that's what I assume was the case based on measurements and the experience.

Do you know anyone else doing similar editing with the same media types as you?
Maybe it'd be possible for you to create a tiny mini library that just contains the section that struggles on your machine or a replica with free stock footage or something that also stutters with similar compositing or something and send to me? I'd like to try and see with my new 2020 iMac with the Radeon 5700XT how much VRAM it would allocate, since it's allocating 100% of your VRAM

Right now its struggling with this animation plugin on...
But when I do come across this issue with just regular layers and layer masking then I can send you the entire library to test out. That would be interesting.

Lastly, heres the screenshot when the frames start skipping and the system seems to struggle.. lemme know what you think.