Nvidia eGPU's and Apple... hack or useful resource?

[D. O'Bryan]

Hey all. All the hullabaloo going on over RED's amazing realtime playback demo has me itching to spend some money. Well, that is IF it will actually speed up my system. I am firmly all mac (yes, yes, I know - build a PC for 1/3rd the price...) and am generally pretty happy with the performance but definitely notice it choke when pulling multiple 6 or 8k video streams on a timeline - I generally do my best to split the load across a handful of SSD's.

Apple's official position seems to be AMD or bust, but I recall hearing Nvidia is releasing drivers for Mac? Would something like a Sonnet chassis w/ 2080 be recognized by OS X and DaVinci Resolve as a useable compute engine?


(also - it wouldn't hurt to have a little more VR power when goofing off in BootCamp :001_tongue: )

 

[Misha Engel]

For the time being it's a no go with 2080, 2080ti, 1080, 1080ti etc... just 1080p (for mojave)

 

[D. O'Bryan]

Bummer. Is that an Apple limitation?

 

[Andy_Johnson]

Apple/macOS do not have drivers officially for nVidia at this time for Mojave. There have been *hints* that the two may be cooperating, but nothing is confirmed. I'm also a Mac user and hopeful for a resolution between their differences. But for now, there are no solid eGPU options other than AMD. After looking into that myself, the performance gains are marginal at best and likely not worth the money at this time.

There are some people who are running an older macOS since nVidia drivers seem to work on that, but I don't have all the details since I'm not going to downgrade my Mac to test.

 

[Misha Engel]

Bummer. Is that an Apple limitation?

Yep at the moment it is. You can always build a hackintosh.

 

[D. O'Bryan]

Apple/macOS do not have drivers officially for nVidia at this time for Mojave. There have been *hints* that the two may be cooperating, but nothing is confirmed. I'm also a Mac user and hopeful for a resolution between their differences. But for now, there are no solid eGPU options other than AMD. After looking into that myself, the performance gains are marginal at best and likely not worth the money at this time.

There are some people who are running an older macOS since nVidia drivers seem to work on that, but I don't have all the details since I'm not going to downgrade my Mac to test.

Yeah that must be what I was thinking of, I remembered at one point in recent history that nVidia was planning to release MacOS drivers alongside their Windows builds.

I just felt that in programs that can take advantage of it (more and more I find myself living almost exclusively in Resolve Studio) it would be beneficial to have one card tackling compute functions and the other driving my handful of displays. All the benchmarks use MacBook pro's, which of course will see a speed boost.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Nvidia has updated drivers a couple times over the past year, but nothing for Mojave and even with the updates, they’re still running an older code base in the drivers — so that means none of the new goodness for RED is going to work or be supported/ utilized. And as pointed out, none of the new 2000-series GPUs are properly supported.

There was a plan long ago that nvidia would release Windows, Linux and Mac drivers in step... But Apple has shut them out as a GPU supplier. It has been over 9 years since Apple released their last system to accept a PCIe GPU and it’s been 6 years since Apple has used an integrated nvidia GPU. The fact that nvidia even offers drivers for the Mac at this point is pretty amazing. Although I suppose it’s almost more of an F-U to Apple that they do it because the two companies do not get along and it’s not just about GPU chipsets — they’ve become vicious competitors in chip development and AI/ML tech, developing a lot of similar stuff behind the scenes and poaching employees from each other.

 

[Björn Benckert]

Yes Nvidia dos not currently fly on Mojave. We run High Sierra hackintoch machines and they play 8k red like butter in 16bit 8k full debayer using 1080ti´s. But I guess the new sauce from red would make it even better. To me it seams like the GPU bottle neck is not really a bottle neck any more. Two good AMD boards in a hackingtosh and you can work flawlessly in 8k even in Mojave. Personally I don't stress to upgrade to Mojave, as flame runs more stable still on high Sierra.

Really hope they release the new sauce if even just for older Mac operating systems. Lots of people out there that would benefit using old Mac towers and stuff. Think if nothing else that would piss apple off even more. lol.