Black Magic EGPU on Rhino for Macbook Pro

Rhino Rhino for Mac
1

I am running a 2017 Macbook Pro with AMD Radeon 560 Graphics and 16g RAM.
I am considering purchase of a Black Magic EGPU. Can Rhino for Mac take advantage of the Black Magic EGPU? What about using the EGPU with Rhino under Bootcamp, Windows environment? Would I see any performance boost there, such as when using cycles render?

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Well I can’t speak specifically to that but Rhino handles EGPU’s fine, it doesn’t have to do anything to “support” it. It is simply another video card, just with a slower connection than 16X PCI–even slower if you don’t use an external video card connected to the EGPU, so it has to also send the finished video back through to the laptop screen–but it’s unlikely you’ll notice it. I have a Razer laptop and an EGPU, and it’s cool.

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I’ve been running a RX480 8GB Shaphire on my eGPU on my Macbook Pro 2015 for about 2yrs now, no problem whatsoever. Both Rhino Mac and Win works fine. (version 5)
The only issue I have is that for some reason windows (bootcamp) does not recognize my egpu if the onboard GPU is running, so under Windows I have to disable the GPU that runs onboard. On the Mac everything work supperb.
The one thing to know is that EGPU acceleration only works on External monitors, it will not power the internal screen.
I also do a ton of real-time rendering for VR work, which I could not do it without the eGPU.

P.S.: I have it running on a Akitio 2 for about 1.5yrs and now I am running it on a Breakaway Box (much easier setup, straight out of the box using AMD cards)

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Jim, thanks for the response. My Macbook does have USB-C ports, so that should be faster for me. Do you know, when running intensive activities like rendering, is Rhino taking advantage of both the onboard GPU as well as the external while processing data at the same time? Or does the software only use one GPU at a time?

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Jnmandel, I am also running a 2017 MBP -So wonder, did you manage to work out the benefits of the eGPU? Can Rhino use the the GPU’s for 3D graphics processing and as maths processor for geometry calculations too?

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Hi,
I bought an EGPU (Razer Core, rx5700) recently for my Mac Mini. It’s awesome, everything is much smoother. I don’t regret it.

Best regards
Ben

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Could get into a little more detail please, I’m also interested in this topic.

1 Like
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hi, I have an eGPU Sonnet Breakaway Box 550 with a Radeon Pro WX 7100 graphics card, running on an mac 10.15.7. I am unable to activate the graphics card as a renderer on RhinoWIP 7 or earlier versions. The card is recognized in the ‘SystemInfo’, but not in the ‘Cycles’. Any ideas? ThankYou - roland

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@nathanletwory Do you know if this Radeon card should work with OpenCL in Cycles on Mac?

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I asked this recently.
Nathan replied,

" in V7 we don’t support GPU rendering at all.
The reason is Apple with very poor OpenCL support. Upstream developers decided to no longer support OpenCL on the Mac, which means no AMD GPU rendering."

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John, this is disappointing to hear. I realize that Apple often does things which frustrate the developer community, but Apple has provided a solution with Metal. Are you planning to support that in V7? https://developer.apple.com/metal/

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For Cycles it depends also on the upstream development. There have been some experiments in creating a Metal backend, but nothing useful has come of it yet.

I doubt there will be any good backend any time soon. More likely v8.

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Its so sad that the Radeon cards can’t be used in our Macs, I’m running one of the new 16" MBP’s and the GPU is pretty handy 🤷