having troubles with my e-gpu

[MythicalButt]

My laptop notices that i have my egpu in, but when gaming it only utilizes around 50% and only manages to hit around 50 fps in apex legends. Its a RX 6700 XT, and in my laptop i have a Ryzen 7 8845HS

[Agall]

2 minutes ago, MythicalButt said:

My laptop notices that i have my egpu in, but when gaming it only utilizes around 50% and only manages to hit around 50 fps in apex legends. Its a RX 6700 XT, and in my laptop i have a Ryzen 7 8845HS

How is this eGPU connected and are you using an external display or the internal laptop display with it?

[MythicalButt]

I',m using a external display, and the E-GPU is powered through TB 3

[Agall]

2 minutes ago, MythicalButt said:

I',m using a external display, and the E-GPU is powered through TB 3

What laptop (including which port), enclosure, thunderbolt cable length are you using?

 

Remember to reply or @ someone so they're notified when you reply  

[MythicalButt]

My laptop is the Lenovo Yoga Pro 7 Gen 9 (14″ AMD), and I'm using a TB 3.2 port. The enclosure is Mantiz Venus MZ-02, and would guess the cable is around 30cm

[Kilrah]

Was it better before? If not you're likely just limited by the TB3 bandwidth.

[MythicalButt]

12 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

Was it better before? If not you're likely just limited by the TB3 bandwidth.

I don’t know, I just got it today

[Agall]

50 minutes ago, MythicalButt said:

My laptop is the Lenovo Yoga Pro 7 Gen 9 (14″ AMD), and I'm using a TB 3.2 port. The enclosure is Mantiz Venus MZ-02, and would guess the cable is around 30cm

You should be using the left port from the perspective of this screenshot. The right one is lower bandwidth and probably shouldn't even work with an eGPU.

 

[MythicalButt]

1 minute ago, Agall said:

You should be using the left port from the perspective of this screenshot. The right one is lower bandwidth and probably shouldn't even work with an eGPU.

 

Its the exact opposite

[Agall]

2 minutes ago, MythicalButt said:

Its the exact opposite

USB 4.0 sometimes has thunderbolt support, usb 3.2 doesn't. USB 4.0 might have 40Gb/sec, the USB 3.2 Gen 2 is only 20Gb/sec. You need 40Gb/sec to have an eGPU provide any meaningful performance. You're still not going to have full 6700 XT performance or even frame time latency, but it'll be maybe 80%.

 

You should be using the USB 4.0 port.

[MythicalButt]

1 minute ago, Agall said:

USB 4.0 sometimes has thunderbolt support, usb 3.2 doesn't. USB 4.0 might have 40Gb/sec, the USB 3.2 Gen 2 is only 20Gb/sec. You need 40Gb/sec to have an eGPU provide any meaningful performance. You're still not going to have full 6700 XT performance or even frame time latency, but it'll be maybe 80%.

 

You should be using the USB 4.0 port.

When i put in the USB 4.0 port it doesn’t even notice the GPU. 

[MythicalButt]

5 minutes ago, Agall said:

USB 4.0 sometimes has thunderbolt support, usb 3.2 doesn't. USB 4.0 might have 40Gb/sec, the USB 3.2 Gen 2 is only 20Gb/sec. You need 40Gb/sec to have an eGPU provide any meaningful performance. You're still not going to have full 6700 XT performance or even frame time latency, but it'll be maybe 80%.

 

You should be using the USB 4.0 port.

Something I have noticed. is when I look away from the bots in Apex Legends, the utilizasion sky rockets to 90%. And when I put the EGPU in the USB 4.0  port, it dosent show up in the device manager under display devices. Not sure if it is revelant but event viewer contains a lot of meta data staging failed.

[MythicalButt]

34 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

Was it better before? If not you're likely just limited by the TB3 bandwidth.

I get a bit faster performance on my screen, if thats what your asking about

[Agall]

35 minutes ago, MythicalButt said:

When i put in the USB 4.0 port it doesn’t even notice the GPU. 

How is it detected via the USB 3.2 port? Is it showing up as a thunderbolt device or just USB? Do you have a thunderbolt driver installed? 

[MythicalButt]

34 minutes ago, Agall said:

How is it detected via the USB 3.2 port? Is it showing up as a thunderbolt device or just USB? Do you have a thunderbolt driver installed? 

I just downloaded the driver, and it still doesnt work. But the EGPU seems to pull 40GBPS 

[Kilrah]

eGPUs need the PCIe link Thunderbolt provides, they won't work on non-Thunderbolt ports.

 

And the 40Gbps Thunderbolt link will limit GPUs, that's one of the reasons eGPUs never caught on that much. Price to performance ratio's pretty poor.

[MythicalButt]

6 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

eGPUs need the PCIe link Thunderbolt provides, they won't work on non-Thunderbolt ports.

 

And the 40Gbps Thunderbolt link will limit GPUs, that's one of the reasons eGPUs never caught on that much. Price to performance ratio's pretty poor.

But my port is Thunderbolt? And on userbenchmark (I know its a bad site) it performed pretty well considering its an EGPU: https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/68139002

[Kilrah]

4 minutes ago, MythicalButt said:

But my port is Thunderbolt?

Yes that's why it works, that comment was for others.

 

 

5 minutes ago, MythicalButt said:

And on userbenchmark

Yeah they're typically considered useless, and their benchmark likely doesn't reflect what the game needs. 

[Agall]

28 minutes ago, MythicalButt said:

I just downloaded the driver, and it still doesnt work. But the EGPU seems to pull 40GBPS 

Another thing to ensure is that you're not using that same dock for anything but the eGPU and its monitor. I wouldn't even plug a keyboard+mouse into it for instance.

 

Otherwise, yeah, thunderbolt eGPUs aren't the greatest. As someone who daily drove a Razer Blade and Razer Core for over a year back in 2016-2017 and then again with a Yoga i7 1065G7 equipped laptop back in 2020, its not great.

 

The extra frame time latency was so bad that when I swapped back to my 4790k build back in 2017, it solved all the weird performance issues I had in games like WoW with missing spell interrupts. I was able to measure an increase of 50ms of input latency using Overwatch's performance metrics when comparing my eGPU GTX 1080 to the onboard GTX 1060 mobile.

[MythicalButt]

On 6/26/2024 at 10:57 PM, Agall said:

Another thing to ensure is that you're not using that same dock for anything but the eGPU and its monitor. I wouldn't even plug a keyboard+mouse into it for instance.

 

Otherwise, yeah, thunderbolt eGPUs aren't the greatest. As someone who daily drove a Razer Blade and Razer Core for over a year back in 2016-2017 and then again with a Yoga i7 1065G7 equipped laptop back in 2020, its not great.

 

The extra frame time latency was so bad that when I swapped back to my 4790k build back in 2017, it solved all the weird performance issues I had in games like WoW with missing spell interrupts. I was able to measure an increase of 50ms of input latency using Overwatch's performance metrics when comparing my eGPU GTX 1080 to the onboard GTX 1060 mobile.

I mean my RX 6700 XT should run a bit faster than my 780m. The main problem is that my utilisation drops in some games. in assassin creed origins and apex legends, the utilisation drops and peaks alt the time, while in older games like minecraft it remains the same without any problems.

[Agall]

6 minutes ago, MythicalButt said:

I mean my RX 6700 XT should run a bit faster than my 780m. The main problem is that my utilisation drops in some games. in assassin creed origins and apex legends, the utilisation drops and peaks alt the time, while in older games like minecraft it remains the same without any problems.

Minecraft is largely CPU bound, an example being when you play it on the Steam Deck, the GPU is using <1W and the CPU is using over 10W.

 

Those other games will be generally GPU bound. Having sub 99% utilization with a thunderbolt eGPU is expected, but I can see the performance being not nearly as good on a 20Gb/sec port versus 40Gb/sec.

 

Back in the day, a pre-requisite to whether a TB3 eGPU host was worth it was validating the bandwidth of the TB3 ports. It was a toss whether a device was configured with a 20Gb/sec or 40Gb/sec port. It would still work, but it was reducing the bandwidth even further. 40Gb/sec is already not enough for a decently capable GPU, and including the losses from the thunderbolt protocol, its expected to only see ~80% of the performance.

 

Still, I would try to get it working on the USB4 port, whether that's drivers or a UEFI setting, or such. Its hard to say why its not working without shotgunning a ton of variables, including firmware and software.