eGPU support

[DrMacintosh]

Hello, So I've got a 2016 13" nTB MBP and while I absolutely love the performance of the Iris 540 iGPU for light gaming and editing in FinalCut, it obviously doesn't hold up too well to more demanding titles.

I know that Apple has they list of supported eGPUs, afaik only RX 500 series and Vega cards are the only officially supported cards, but this has me wondering....what happens if you plug an unofficially supported card into an eGPU enclosure such as an older gen AMD card?

 

Does the card working rely on the manufacturer (In my case AMD) providing drivers for the card in the eGPU setting? Or is there something on Apples end that must be enabled?

I ideally would like to pick up a Sapphire Nitro+ RX 580 4GB but I currently own an MSI R9 380 4GB which is in my PC. Obviously the RX 580 would work in an eGPU enclosure, but I would rather give my PC the Sapphire 580 and give my MacBook the MSI 380.

 

TLDR; provided that AMD provided eGPU drivers to the R9 380, would it work in an eGPU enclosure?

[AnTicXz]

I would say don't buy a mac for gaming at alllllll. but since your name is Drmacintosh i dont think I can chnage that. Gpu over thunderbolt behave just like a gpu that is connected if they are connected properly, just install the drivers. 

[DrMacintosh]

Just now, CODboyX said:

I would say don't buy a mac for gaming at alllllll. but since your name is Drmacintosh i dont think I can chnage that. Gpu over thunderbolt behave just like a gpu that is connected if they are connected properly, just install the drivers. 

Never bought this machine for gaming, but this machine has Thunderbolt and the ability to play games, so I'm more than willing to utilize its capabilities. 

 

You could say I should have just gotten laptop with a dGPU but those have problems all their own. Also isn't the point of the thread. 

[Syntaxvgm]

I would suggest doing more research because before it officially worked people were doing it on thunderbolt on older macbooks with any gpu, though on windows mostly. The only limitation then was the only way to get it to show up on the laptops built in screen at that point was to be using an nvidia gpu and NOT have a dedicated gpu in the macbook, allowing you to trick some kind of optimus driver I think.

I have experience getting non supported gpus to work on mac years and years ago. To my memory, to throw a gpu on a mac machine like a mac pro, you had to make a vbios that worked, and there were even tools to generate this, which allowed non officially supported models even. On OS side however, I was able to get any gpu on a hackintosh with some kexts. 

So ask around place like notebookreview forums. They'll know more specifics, and some probably will have done it themselves. I imagine the answer is yes you can, but you may be limited to windows or have to do something janky on mac? 

[Ericarthurc]

If your going to get the egpu enclosure anyways, It's worth giving it a shot. Here is what I do know about Macs and gpus, AMD doesn't provide drivers for mac. The divers are called .kexts and they are preinstalled on the mac system when you buy it. The R9 380 uses the AMD9000Controller.kext. Here is the grey area, the R9 380 works out of the box with Mac on hackintosh systems. So it's possible the system could use the R9 380 over egpu. For sure the 580 will work, that was disclosed in the 10.13.4 High Sierra update. I say, give it a shot, if it doesn't work get a 580. Good luck!

[DrMacintosh]

2 minutes ago, Syntaxvgm said:

I imagine the answer is yes you can, but you may be limited to windows or have to do something janky on mac? 

Personally don't care about being limited to Windows. Windows has more games in my library anyway. 

[Syntaxvgm]

1 minute ago, DrMacintosh said:

Personally don't care about being limited to Windows. Windows has more games in my library anyway. 

well if you run into problems and cant get an answer here, notebookreivew forums. Been some years myself since I did a ton of laptop shit, but I used to get really good help on stupid specific laptop things like flashing the vbios on mxm cards and stuff like that there. 

[TheGlenlivet]

Everything I have read like this, https://9to5mac.com/2017/04/19/akitio-node-gtx-1080-ti-gpu-macbook-pro-gaming-egpu/, says that it will work, but with some bugs and issues.  Also everyone seems to agree that bootcamp and windows is the best way to game on Apple Hardware.  

So possible? Yes.

Ideal?  No.  Unless you are going bootcamp.

[DrMacintosh]

12 minutes ago, TheGlenlivet said:

Also everyone seems to agree that bootcamp and windows is the best way to game on Apple Hardware.  

Of course it is. It’s got DX support and Vulkan. macOS just has OpenGL and Metal.