MacOS 10.13.4 brings support for eGPU's but

Operating Systems & Open Source Mac & iOS
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  • “official” support is limited. Only RX570, RX580, Vega 56, Vega 64, WX7100, and WX9100. IRL more cards will work just fine with it like the RX470/RX480 and some other older AMD cards.
  • All the cards listed above are currently impossible to find at MSRP due to cryptocurrency mining issues, especially for RX4xx/RX5xx and Vega model cards so this is kind of a bad time to release this update IMO
  • Nvidia based GPU’s are officially not supported. While nvidia does provide drivers, supposedly they dont work great or at all over thunderbolt. This isnt greally great because generally speaking, more programs (especially adobe programs) can get better use from CUDA. Also, Nvidia is the only company that has any high end GPU’s currently (GTX1080ti, Titan V, etc)
  • while this is better for those who wish to do gaming on the macbooks/imacs, it’s still not great due to OSX’s poor support for anything gaming related (you’ll lost anywhere from 25-75% performance in games just by using OSX). Video editing, 3D rendering and any other GPu accelerated workloads on the other hand will get a huge benefit from this.
  • IRL Nvidia GPU’s should still work relatively OK with the provided webdrivers since Thunderbolt is just a normal PCIe connection. Its possible some lower level stuff might not work as seamlessly but it should be OK
  • THunderbolt 2 will not have support for eGPU according to Apple. 2015 machines and older can’t take advantage of this.

Looks like Apple is quite salty with Nvidia after all these years, they they just shun them entirely and those who want to stay official will get shafted by those GPU prices

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R.I.P. trashcan.

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Homebrew OSX (Not Hackintosh, this is more like Jailbreaking real Macs) will have to be a thing, to bypass these restrictions to run Nvidia eGPUs.

Either that, or if it works, don’t update.

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Trashcan was DOA though…

I think with the webdrivers you can use Nvidia eGPU’s but you may not get the full compatibility in terms of CUDA optimizations and such

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CUDA works fine on OSX with their CUDA drivers. But the PCI-E bandwidth is limited to PCI-E 1.1 if the card isn’t EFI flashed for the tower Macs.

You can’t flash them yourself. Only Apple authorized service centers have the EFI code.

The performance issues are because the cards are LITERALLY running PCI-E 1.1 x4 over Thunderbolt.

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This always happens. Nvidia is always slow to work on new projects like this.

It took them months after high sierra to release a driver for it.

Nvidia support will come, you just gotta be patient.

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Their Pascal drivers are pretty shitty. Wonder if that has anything to do with it. There’s a ton of posts on Mac forums saying that the drivers are causing wake from sleep display issues, display lag, etc…

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I’m pretty happy this has finally come to an official release after being mentioned at launch.

I had a nVidia GTX 1070 connected via TB3 although was limited to running Windows only - nVidia 10xx series drivers weren’t out (maybe still aren’t?).

Work as usual got in the way of free time for gaming so I just sold the card for about the same price I paid for the card and kept the TB3 enclosure.

If/when prices settle down again I’d be happy with a Vega 56 (maybe push to a 64) and get support in OS X and Windows.

What would be awesome though, would be if VMWare would allow TB3 GPU passthrough in an update to Fusion. That and a 6-core i7 MBP with 32Gb of RAM. One can dream right! lol