This is especially important for folks in the 3D industry who rely on NVIDIA's CUDA system - something currently unsupported in any Mac available on the market today. Plug in an enclosure via a Thunderbolt 3 cable and voilà you've got desktop-class graphics performance for your slim MacBook. Sonnet has gone towards the unadorned cardboard approach for the enclosure. That led to the new MacBook Pro being equipped with the latest AMD GPUs, even if there were doubly-more-powerful NVIDIA chips available.īut there's another option, at least in theory: the external GPU. Apples external GPU developers kit is shipping, and AppleInsider takes an examination of the contents, and delves a bit into compatibility. There are always tradeoffs to make, and Apple tends to err on the side of battery life and heat management over raw performance. There's no denying that graphics performance in current Macs isn't the best. What you need to know about the Mac, Thunderbolt 3, and external GPUs The eGPU kit allows you to connect an HTC Vive VR headset to your Mac running macOS High Sierra for virtual reality game and application development. If you have 2 USB-C monitors? Your SOL for now.Apple wants developers to be onboard with virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) development and has released a cost-effective external graphics processing unit (eGPU) to help with just that. And there was 1 lowly USB-C graphics card announced recently: Well share our thoughts when wed gather enough experience. Looks like you should get a regular non USB-C monitor for now if you wanna use an eGPU and will unfortunately have to wait on Apple AND graphics card makers to get support and ports for USB-C monitors. Hello Mikey,Were still testing the Apple eGPU developer-kit. you the run a cable from that expansion card to your USB-C monitor. You then hook a cable from your graphics card to the correct DP Alt Mode port on the expansion card in the back of your comp. You have to buy a PCIe converter card and install it in the tower.

Here is a laugh: I also researched how I might connect the Ultrafine with my PC. There is one on amazon that claims the cable runs with alternate mode, but I have not found ANYONE that has the Ultrafine, and eGPU and has tried this.

At this time an adapter does not appear to exist that is DisplayPort to USB-C and is compatible. The LG (the only montior i ca speak to) APPEARS to us DP 1.3 (or 1.2) over DisplayPort Alternate mode. I will share my research: It is unlikely that and graphics card with DisplayPort out will work with a USB-C monitor. I have posted on multiple sites and been very involved in trying to figure this out. Good luck to ANYONE who wants to try this with a USB-C monitor like the LG Ultrafine.

Apple egpu developer kit