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Razer Core Compatibility

SoyCapitanSoyCapitan said:
You are talking to someone who used these apps since the days of Superpaint and Quantel Paintbox. You're taking to someone who is the main hardware and software tester on the Mac Pro forum.

There is almost zero CUDA in most photo editing apps including Photoshop. A couple of simple plugins that don't even fully utilise all the cores. End of the story.
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With all due respect, my point wasnt just on photograph applications. Good for you being a tester in Mac Pro forum. Obviously you probably have more experience than I do with concrete comparison tests and so on.

But fundamentals dont change; higher end hardware and their use are valued differently for different people with different combination of use.

In my case, I do light gaming, prefer to have one Macbook Pro, use photoshop and other related tools, need portability, and want upgradability. I also dont want chunky PC desktop anywhere in my room. Mac pro is way beyond my budget while iMac doesnt have the screen I want (Radeon is not my preferred video card neither).

So if people are like me, the value of having eGPU is very great. Whether Photoshop "fully" utilize CUDA or not, higher end graphic card still enhances GPU hardware acceleration.

In addition, as you may know already, more GPU support is the current trend. Heck even cars use GPU as of late. More and more softwares benefit better GPU hardware. So this definetly future proofs your laptop.
 
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Lightroom uses GPU for like thumbnails, Photoshop uses it for that little 3D tab that no one uses, I don't think Illustrator uses it at all, and InDesign uses it for placed image display quality. Yes there is 'Hardware acceleration' but it's really minimal, no amount of CUDA cores makes a difference with 2D stuff.

What I was saying and others have said, is CUDA/Workstation GPU stuff is mainly 3D, which again is mainly still CPU driven. So there is little benefit of paring a high end GPU with a notebook, any notebook. The internal stuff is more than adequate for the work, and not nearly appropriate for 3D stuff. Honestly CUDA cores are highly overrated, on paper they're obviously amazing, but in reality there isn't much software that utilises it.

I can't speak for video rendering, I'm sure it makes a difference in time there but I don't do that, only 2D/3D design.
 
New_Mac_Smell said:
Lightroom uses GPU for like thumbnails, Photoshop uses it for that little 3D tab that no one uses, I don't think Illustrator uses it at all, and InDesign uses it for placed image display quality. Yes there is 'Hardware acceleration' but it's really minimal, no amount of CUDA cores makes a difference with 2D stuff.

What I was saying and others have said, is CUDA/Workstation GPU stuff is mainly 3D, which again is mainly still CPU driven. So there is little benefit of paring a high end GPU with a notebook, any notebook. The internal stuff is more than adequate for the work, and not nearly appropriate for 3D stuff. Honestly CUDA cores are highly overrated, on paper they're obviously amazing, but in reality there isn't much software that utilises it.

I can't speak for video rendering, I'm sure it makes a difference in time there but I don't do that, only 2D/3D design.
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I understand that the CUDA cores are not utilized broadly. I just pointed it out as one of many gpu's usefulness :/.. The talk unintentionally went that direction.. However GPU hardware acceleration is a separate thing, isnt it?
 
Tycho24 said:
That is from a base model late 2016 13" MacBook Pro without the TouchBar.
It only has two ports. Both are the full speed.

It just simply doesn't seem to be supported yet.
I'm sure drivers, software, or some type of workaround will emerge!
This has got to be a RIDICULOUSLY ripe & lucrative market for such a solution.
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Well that's a deal breaker, I use a egpu with my 2012 Mac mini over TB1 with zero issues and works first time.

If my new 2016 mbp does not work out of the box, it's going back.
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wheelhot said:
Hmm, so it seems we're getting eGPU support, though I'm curious, why is there a Mac driver for cards like GTX 980 Ti? Who "ported" them?

https://bizon-tech.com/us/bizonbox3-egpu.html/#457:1563;460:1573

And it makes me wonder why did Kickstarter project like the Wolfe was axed?
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Nvidia did, there are no drivers for pascal though, so the new 10xx cards are not working at full potential, again waiting for nvidia to release drivers
 
MH01 said:
Nvidia did, there are no drivers for pascal though, so the new 10xx cards are not working at full potential, again waiting for nvidia to release drivers
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Hmm, not saying it's a bad thing, but why does Nvidia do that? A nod to the hackintosh community?
 
wheelhot said:
Hmm, not saying it's a bad thing, but why does Nvidia do that? A nod to the hackintosh community?
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Previous versions of macs had nvudia hardware so that needed support and also they get to sell products to people using old mac pros and with growth of egpus, mac users are a valid market.

Though I admit that pascal drivers are long over due so maybe Nvidia might not support the newer gear.

Apple seems to have jumped on the AMD bandwagon
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fyun89 said:
Doubt Apple likes this though, as people could just opt for the lowest spec mac (unless you need every bit of that higher spec CPU) and get a Core.. If they intentionally blocked this, I wouldn't be surprised.
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They would still need the fastest CPU for best performance, it's just that they could get the lowest spec GPU....which are frankly garbage anyway , hence people wanting to use an egpu.

Apple has to be careful locking down their hardware like this , if TB is to become a standard , people will not buy macs that work only with certain hardware based on apples profit model
 
Honestly I think Apple made a "mistake" by locking down the Thunderbolt 3 port to certain controllers and devices like the Razer Core / eGPUs. Eventhough they might loose €120,- for their own GPU upgrade (450 -> 460) it will surely make up for it's self in terms of overall sales quantity. At the moment more and more notebooks are getting equipped with Thunderbolt 3 and are getting a "premium" feel (and price-point) in other words: rMBPs are getting competitors. Apple made the upcoming 15" faster in everyway (aside from the maximum amount of RAM) than their competition (Precision, XPS15, ZBOOK Studio, Zenbook) for the moment but those will get Pascal/Polaris upgrades too on a short term.
 
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I for one would welcome eGPU as they're situations where I need the GPU boost for my 3D CAD, and I always find it as a win-win situation for Apple and its power users
 
Why even bother when there are simpler and cheaper alternatives coming out?
 
are their any eGPU's that use mobile graphics instead? (Or is that not how they work?)

Would be pretty cool If their was a smaller version of eGPU's that you can carry around in your bag and give you a nice boost in graphics when needed.

I was going to go down the 15' macbook pro, but then I might keep my eye out on this development the next few weeks.

The portability of the 13' but then hook it upto to give it a massive GPU boost is a pretty nice alternative.
 
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AKiTiO notified me Pre-Order for the Node will be live on Amazon in the next few days.

The bad news is they have not been able to make it work with Late 2016 MacBook Pro.
 
theitsage said:
AKiTiO notified me Pre-Order for the Node will be live on Amazon in the next few days.

The bad news is they have not been able to make it work with Late 2016 MacBook Pro.
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I'm curious if that is all together or just in macOS. I wonder if they had any success with the MBP & Bootcamp.
 
Robstevo said:
are their any eGPU's that use mobile graphics instead? (Or is that not how they work?)

Would be pretty cool If their was a smaller version of eGPU's that you can carry around in your bag and give you a nice boost in graphics when needed.

I was going to go down the 15' macbook pro, but then I might keep my eye out on this development the next few weeks.

The portability of the 13' but then hook it upto to give it a massive GPU boost is a pretty nice alternative.
Click to expand...

I can't find the video, but last year, I believe at CES, Intel demoed thunderbolt 3 eGPU's in a small form factor. Something you can easily carry around with you. They never detailed what GPU they were running but some people assumed they were AMD GPU's.

There was also another company, whose name escapes me, that had a kickstarter or indiegogo campaign to put in Nvidia 965m/970m GPU's in a small thunderbolt 3 package. However, they seem to have either gone out of business or decided to rethink their strategy.

This is a really interesting category for some Video card manufacturers to maybe look into. Right now the focus seems to be on big rigs that can hold desktop cards. I think with Nvidia's 10 series cards being so new, we haven't seen anyone make a small portable eGPU using the laptop variants of Nvidia's 10 series. But I hope they come soon. I'm more interested in something I can carry around with me, rather then something that will only stay at home.
 
KarmaRocket said:
I can't find the video, but last year, I believe at CES, Intel demoed thunderbolt 3 eGPU's in a small form factor. Something you can easily carry around with you. They never detailed what GPU they were running but some people assumed they were AMD GPU's.

There was also another company, whose name escapes me, that had a kickstarter or indiegogo campaign to put in Nvidia 965m/970m GPU's in a small thunderbolt 3 package. However, they seem to have either gone out of business or decided to rethink their strategy.

This is a really interesting category for some Video card manufacturers to maybe look into. Right now the focus seems to be on big rigs that can hold desktop cards. I think with Nvidia's 10 series cards being so new, we haven't seen anyone make a small portable eGPU using the laptop variants of Nvidia's 10 series. But I hope they come soon. I'm more interested in something I can carry around with me, rather then something that will only stay at home.
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You must have seen the Acer Graphics Dock which comes with a 960M.

Acer_Graphics_Dock_01.jpg
 
wheelhot said:
Hmm, so it seems we're getting eGPU support, though I'm curious, why is there a Mac driver for cards like GTX 980 Ti? Who "ported" them?

https://bizon-tech.com/us/bizonbox3-egpu.html/#457:1563;460:1573

And it makes me wonder why did Kickstarter project like the Wolfe was axed?
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There isn't a special driver, it's just the standard 970/980 one.

Wolfe was cancelled because they did not own the licenses to produce TB2 devices, see their kickstarter for info.
 
Cindori said:
Wolfe was cancelled because they did not own the licenses to produce TB2 devices, see their kickstarter for info.
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Aaah, and getting this license will be expensive? I thought Intel lowered the license price to make Thunderbolt more competitive? or is it still too high in comparison to USB?
 
fyun89 said:
So if people are like me, the value of having eGPU is very great. Whether Photoshop "fully" utilize CUDA or not, higher end graphic card still enhances GPU hardware acceleration.

In addition, as you may know already, more GPU support is the current trend. Heck even cars use GPU as of late. More and more softwares benefit better GPU hardware. So this definetly future proofs your laptop.
Click to expand...

That's not happening so much for Photoshop. With CS6 they introduced the Mercury Graphics Engine for accelerating drawing, calculations and a few filters. It's mostly running on the CPU, and also leans on OpenGL. It has to support a few million legacy systems and older hardware so it's very optimised and even a GeForce GT120 (a 2009 graphics card) isn't stressed by it.

Furthermore MGE only lightly uses OpenCL for a few operations and has no CUDA support.

So no, Photoshop isn't like a video game or running a video/CG render. Throwing faster and faster hardware doesn't make it go faster and faster. Workstation and creativity apps tend to have a performance ceiling.

We have a Photoshop benchmark thread on the Mac Pro forum that leans on OpenCL and multiple CPU cores. Testing a a modern quad core CPU like the 6700K with several generations of graphics cards yielded basically the same result. Testing a 12 core X5690 with the same graphics cards also yielded the same result. We had reached a performance ceiling.
 
KarmaRocket said:
Actually that wasn't it. I clearly remember it was silver/white and orange. They had various sizes as well. One as big as the Acer Graphics Dock and some smaller ones.
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I think it was from the Intel demo at IDF 2015

 
Has anyone got this working on a 15" 2016 MBP?

I've tried everything and I can't seem to get it to work, even on windows. Everything lights up but you can't seem to switch the GPU even with Razer's GPU Switcher.
 
There's a workaround posted on netkas forum. You'll need to patch IOThunderboltFamily.kext. This file dictates which Thunderbolt device gets the handshake.
 
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