Well, I've got my Sonnet eGPU breakout box, the 550W spec'd version, and an RX 580 card with 8Gb of DDR5 VRAM- my MacBook Pro retine 15 inch late 2017 recognised it straight away, and connected straight away. I did some tests with it and Davinci Resolve (the free version) - it does make quite a difference to the edit experience. The final render isn't quite as quick as I had hoped based on my edit experience. We're spending about 90% of our time in edit and Fusion Fx part of Davinci, where many of the FX elements are put out to the eGPU. Final rendering isn't quite so focused on the eGPU apparently. I'm fine with that - lunch or a coffee whilst it does final rendering/delivery is OK by me!
I'm seeing pretty much the performance boosts the ads/spec sheets indicate - about 75% improvement where imported 1080 video is being messed with, and about 100% improvement where it's all down to Fx processing.
The demands of the Davinci user interface & experience can be high, so we are going to the paid version which amongst other things allows multiple GPUs to be used, so the internal discrete GPU, a Radeon RX 560 with 4 Gb of ram can be dedicated to that task alone.
Getting to the same point on my 2 colleagues Lenovo P50 & P51 workstations was a little different. The P51 just needed some driver updates which it took care of by itself when I plugged in the eGPU. We then ran in to some "GPU memory full" errors which kept crashing Davinci. We soon found we had poor settings for Davinci's use of RAM, so fixed that and ordered another 32Gb to add to the 16Gb already in there. The P51 has a Quadro 2000 discrete GPU built in. After that, plain sailing.
The older P50 needed 2 BIOS updates and a stern talking to to take on an eNVM firmware update for its thunderbolt devices. But after that we were fine - that did take a morning almost though. Again, the paid for version of Davinci will allow all 3 of us to dedicate the built in discrete GPU for handling the apps' own console & User Interface tasks - we've been editing reasonably complex Fx in it and can see the need - minor annoyance factor but for the sake of $300 each - remember we're a business, and we're supporting the ongoing sales education of 1000 sales people around the world who average $4M each in sales annually, so the business case is a no brainer! That said if this were my own business, my own money, I'd spring for the $300 paid version - a test of spending needs at my employer as we're also to some extent shareholders, and whatever we spend on this hardware & apps will reduce the pool of bonus money available, if any(!)...
So far, so good. I'll order up a Vega 64 card and Akitio Node Pro and do some tests with that before deciding on what the 3rd team member's hardware set up will be. We're also likely to get a 'render engine' for final rendering & delivery of each project, and use Davinci's collaborative project management approach that comes with the paid-for version to have all files on the render engine with a nice fat RAID-based backup via network to some other physical location.
Merry Christmas to you all!
