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?
Well I canât speak specifically to that but Rhino handles EGPUâs fine, it doesnât have to do anything to âsupportâ it. It is simply another video card, just with a slower connection than 16X PCIâeven slower if you donât use an external video card connected to the EGPU, so it has to also send the finished video back through to the laptop screenâbut itâs unlikely youâll notice it. I have a Razer laptop and an EGPU, and itâs cool.
Iâve 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)
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?
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 GPUâs for 3D graphics processing and as maths processor for geometry calculations too?
Hi,
I bought an EGPU (Razer Core, rx5700) recently for my Mac Mini. Itâs awesome, everything is much smoother. I donât regret it.
Best regards
Ben
Could get into a little more detail please, Iâm also interested in this topic.
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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 âSystemInfoâ, but not in the âCyclesâ. Any ideas? ThankYou - roland
@nathanletwory Do you know if this Radeon card should work with OpenCL in Cycles on Mac?
I asked this recently.
Nathan replied,
" in V7 we donât 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."
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/
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.
Its so sad that the Radeon cards canât be used in our Macs, Iâm running one of the new 16" MBPâs and the GPU is pretty handy đ¤ˇ