MacOS finally gains external GPU support

There&#x27;s an amazing website and community if you are interested in external GPUs at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;egpu.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;egpu.io&#x2F;</a> . Both for Mac and PC you will find guides, explanations etc.<p>There&#x27;s also an eGPU subreddit and I wrote a sticky on U series chips, PCIe lanes and Thunderbolt 3 <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;eGPU&#x2F;comments&#x2F;7vb0gg&#x2F;u_series_chips_pcie_lanes_and_thunderbolt_3&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;eGPU&#x2F;comments&#x2F;7vb0gg&#x2F;u_series_chips...</a> which is more interesting for PCs than Mac.

This is speculation, but I’m betting that we will see a GPU-backed external display (sort of an iMac minus the Mac) sometime in the next year. Apple never builds out support like this unless they plan on having a product to sell.<p>And they seem to generally &quot;dislike&quot; putting discrete GPUs in laptops, going all the way back to the Titanium G4 days.

Apple has a pretty decent summary of the feature in this support article: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.apple.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;HT208544" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.apple.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;HT208544</a><p>Seems to be limited to AMD GPUs at this time.

Is it true that they disabled support for TB2 eGPU and in doing so broke many people&#x27;s current setups (on pre-2016 hardware)?

I&#x27;ve been using an eGPU for a few months now and It&#x27;s fantastic. It&#x27;s a bit annoying to deal with all of the workarounds for libraries like pytorch&#x2F;tensorflow so you can use the latest version but other than that it&#x27;s great.

CUDA support is pretty critical for a lot of media production. I&#x27;m thankful that official support is here. The downside is a Mac Pro looks like a rats nest of cables with external video I&#x2F;O cards, 10GbE cards, eGPus. It&#x27;s a much larger physical footprint than a tower with a lot more technical troubleshooting resulting in making sure a crappy thunderbolt 2 cable is seated correctly.

Apple doesn&#x27;t want to release a mid-priced ($2000?) desktop for content creators, as that would cannibalize the market of the $8000 Mac Pro and iMac Pro.<p>Now they seem to be realizing they&#x27;re losing that segment of the market to PC side of things, and that people in that segment are often thought leaders. If content creators have PCs, content usually ends up working the best on a PC.

On the MacOS install page for TensorFlow, we have this goodie:<p>Note: As of version 1.2, TensorFlow no longer provides GPU support on macOS.<p>Will eGPU support help change that?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tensorflow.org&#x2F;install&#x2F;install_mac" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tensorflow.org&#x2F;install&#x2F;install_mac</a>

Can anyone comment on whether this will be useful for training neural networks?

I have an Akitio Node - Thunderbolt3 eGPU enclosure which says it accepts full size cards and works with High Sierra with AMD GPU&#x27;s. (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.akitio.com&#x2F;expansion&#x2F;node" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.akitio.com&#x2F;expansion&#x2F;node</a>)<p>What is a good GPU for a budget for someone that just wants to experiment with GPU&#x27;s like OpenCL or some machine or deep learning?<p>If I didn&#x27;t have a budget what would a better card be? :-)

I have a crazy question, why don&#x27;t we put the big gpus in the monitor instead of putting them in the laptop? It is ok to have a small low performance gpu in the laptop like the one i have in my MBP but instead of buying an external gpu i would pretty much buy a large screen with a gpu in it. Maybe it is just me.

What is the point of this if it doesn&#x27;t support any GPUS with a osx driver? I was under the impression that PCI-E was supported by TB3 - the little squabble between Nvidia and Apple needs to stop.

PSA: If you are using a DisplayLink based device, this update will break your setup. They have a beta driver on their site that will re-enable clone mode, but not extended desktops, etc. Through the 10.13.4 beta the rumor was that changes to support eGPU&#x27;s broke something they relied on.<p>Edit: 1.0.13.4 is not a version of macOS.

Very cool! Does anyone know if you can do SLI within any external enclosures with Mac or is that a pipe dream given there is no official driver?

I&#x27;ve always been curious about this. How can I try it out if I already own a GPU?

Mac VR here we come. About time; this will be one of their bigger errors.

Are you able to use an external GPU to drive a MacBook Pros display?

Is there something like this available for Linux and Windows PCs?

Perviously

&quot;How to downgrade your 1080Ti to 1060 by paying additional $400&quot;

Heh, why make another Mac Pro when they can sell a egpu dongle?

Wanted external GPU support while traveling some to be able to do deep learning on the road. Too bad this is only AMD support.