Red Rocket Plus External GPU. Anyone tried?

[Stephen Franchek]

Hello!
I am thinking of switching from a desktop pc with Adobe CCS6PP, a red rocket and a gtx580 to a retina macbooks pro with the same software and external thunderbolt enclosures for red rocket and gtx580. Has anyone tried this configuration? I want the gtx580 for the mercury playback/render engine
Please advise.

 

[Eric Santiago]

Current Thunderbolt tech does not support GPU on the Mac side.

I hope to be proved wrong

 

[Rudy Lehfeldt-Ehlinger]

Check this out, its not for the 580 but the quadro 4000, Ill be testing it later this week and can report back but definitely not supported...
Also you will loose a lot of the performance from both cards simply because thunderbolt doesn't have the necessary bandwidth or speed needed for both of these cards.
http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?100126-Thunderbolt-Support-for-NVIDIA-Quadro-4000!

 

[Nick Pasquariello]

Even with that, remember, Thunderbolt is basically the equivalent to a 4x lane PCIe. The RedRocket uses 8x (so you're only getting about half performance over Thunderbolt, which isn't horrible, but it isn't ideal). A graphics card uses 16x. So you'd get about a quater performance. Using both over Thunderbolt simultaneously is a whole lot of money for not much performance.

[Note, if you read the link pointed to in that thread mentioned above, they do state that you get lower performance from a GPU attached through Thunderbolt. Completely honest and upfront. The limitations of the throughput mean that such a setup is only advantageous if you've already got the GPU, maybe an enclosure, and so your'e spending almost nothing to get a boost in performance. If I have $1k-$5k to spend on gear, it wouldn't be for either GPU or Red Rocket over THunderbolt, but then, I have a lot of other stuff I need to buy before I consider either of those in any capacity.]