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Running Games on a MacBook Pro with an EGPU
- Shivetya 7y agoA very nice how to. For some good real world numbers I always look to https://barefeats.com/ https://barefeats.com/ which has been testing eGPU setups for quite some time on different Macs
- nottorp 7y agoWhy does no one bother talking about eGPU behaviour with mac native games? Believe it or not, there are a few.
- rocky1138 7y agoProbably because it's the wrong tool for the job. If you want to play games, a Mac is easily one of the worst ways to do that. The eGPU method of bolting functionality onto a platform which doesn't want it is only neat on a technical level at best. It is essentially the world's biggest dongle.
- nottorp 7y agoNot if you're bored to tears of AAA games. Plenty of nice indies available cross platform. And for benchmarking etc I see Aspyr has ported a Battlefield of Honor of Duty title...
- baroffoos 7y agoDoes proton work on mac? I have been using it on linux for loads of AAA games like skyrim and age of empires and it has worked almost perfect.
- nottorp 7y agoI said they're boring, I didn't complain that I can't play them :)
- jamesgeck0 7y agoMacOS support was removed back in 2018.
- plufz 7y agoHeh, isn’t that a tiny bit black and white? I manage to enjoy games on macos anyway. :)
- crooked-v 7y agoFor me, it's a dongle that does exactly what I want: max graphics power at home for games, less weight and better battery life when out and about for writing and light browsing. The only reason I don't have an eGPU yet is that most of the market still seems to be making weird compromise-driven design decisions, like sharing a single Thunderbolt controller between the card and any added USB ports.
- zaphoyd 7y agoWon’t disagree with the “wrong tool” characterization, but there are many situations where using the right tool (a dedicated windows pc or game console) comes with many other problematic side effects. I do all of my gaming on a Mac with an eGPU and find it convenient and practical for my needs. It is much better (for my use case and constraints) than my previous solutions of hackintoshes, dedicated windows PCs.
- nottorp 7y agoA dedicated windows pc is a pain. I have separate windows installs but rebooting to win to play a game is also a huge disruption since all my other stuff is on Mac OS. Thus, I've ignored games that don't run on Mac OS for a while. In spite of buying one or three on sales. I actually feel bad about never finishing Witcher 3... ;)
- derefr 7y agoHave you tried running a Windows VM under macOS with the GPU passed through?
- _fzslm 7y agoI don't think there's any way to do this on macOS right now.
- alluro2 7y agoOof - I left it unfinished for more than a year. Finally got around to picking it up a little, maybe a month ago, and got completely hooked until I finished it + DLCs. It was a true gaming delight - the DLCs are amazing as well, and, as a whole, it's easily the best game of all times for me - and I believe I played almost every significant RPG ever...I found it so much more worth my time than movies or playing anything else.
- knolan 7y agoIt really is an exceptional game. It took me three years to finish it. It almost felt that I avoided playing it sometimes incase it ended. Now we’ve the Netflix series to look forward to and Cyberpunk 2077 from CDPR.
- CharlesW 7y ago> The eGPU method of bolting functionality onto a platform which doesn't want it is only neat on a technical level at best. It's neat on every level. To quote the article: > "…you are now able to take a top-of-the-line gaming GPU, seat it inside an external box, plug that box into your computer, and—using a single high-bandwidth cable—push the necessary instructions to render 4K games at 60 frames per second on the card before (over the very same cable!) pushing those frames back to your notebook's built-in monitor without introducing any perceptible latency." I know God intended for us to use PCI cards by opening up cases and inserting them into slots on a motherboard, but it's incredibly cool to be able to just plug one in like a USB device.
- FpUser 7y agoIt is even cooler when one considers how much those eGPU enclosures cost, never mind lack of nVidia support on those.
- owenwil 7y agoBut "just plugging in one USB device" wasn't even what happened in this post. The amount of steps described inside literally were 10x what it takes to just build a PC, boot it, install games and play ️
- mercutio2 7y agoHuh? There were two steps to get macOS working. 1) Put GPU in enclosure 2) Plug Thunderbolt 3 cable into enclosure and MBP Perhaps you’re referring to the novel written on how to make BootCamp Windows work with the eGPU?
- owenwil 7y ago...all of which is because the drivers/config are proprietary
- baroffoos 7y agoIf you wanted to play games on a macbook it probably makes more sense to stream them from a desktop.
- crooked-v 7y agoEspecially in certain genres. For example, in "builder"/4X games, Civ 6, Tropico 6, Hearts of Iron IV, Cities: Skylines, Don't Starve, and Parkitect all have native Mac versions, and that's a substantial chunk out of the Steam top selling charts for the Simulation tag.
- chillacy 7y agoFactorio is on the Mac and now I can't get any work done.
- TheRealDunkirk 7y agoI just upgraded from a 2014 MBPr to a 2019 MBP. I didn't pay for the GPU before, and playing Civ V hurt. Civ VI was impossible. This time, I got the Vega 20, and I am not disappointed. Both games run great.
- Svoka 7y agoWas playing Dota 2 with egpu rx580 for a year now. Works really nice on macOS
- asark 7y agoI'm starting to get "this will stop working soon" messages on a lot of my Mac games. I assume because of the 32bit deprecation. Expecting to lose 50-75% of my library soonish, maybe more. Of the ~60% of my total library that worked on Mac to begin with. MacOS was surprisingly good as a gaming OS, so far as game selection, but it's about to go back to the "we have... Breakout! and, uh, Super Breakout!" olden days, it seems.
- sabizmil 7y agoWhile there are definitely games that will be lost when deprecating 32bit, I think it's harsh to say that we are going back to the olden days. If you look at the top sellers on Steam that have Mac support you'll see a very large library of great games that I don't think anyone would have guessed would be supported on Mac 5-10 years ago. https://store.steampowered.com/macos#p=0&tab=TopSellers https://store.steampowered.com/macos#p=0&tab=TopSellers If anything I think Mac support for games is on the rise and will only continue to grow.
- egypturnash 7y agoHow many of them are 64-bit ready? How many that aren't are likely to ever get recompiled for 64-bit? I'd bet that pretty much nothing but games currently getting regular updates are going to make the jump.
- jchb 7y agoVirtually of them are 64-bit ready. In fact they require a 64-bit OS, also on Windows. "Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system"
- kevingadd 7y agoJust wait for when Apple removes OpenGL. Probably 90% or more of existing games will break unless their middleware can be recompiled for 64bit+metal.
- 7y ago
- toxik 7y agoNow if only Apple and AMD could come up with a good way to write GPU-accelerated programs like CUDA lets you...
- fwip 7y agoThey named it OpenCL.
- mrpippy 7y agoApple's support for OpenCL is deprecated as of 10.14. Metal is the supported way forward.
- skohan 7y agoVulkan (MoltenVK) also works very well.
- baroffoos 7y agoOpenCL is what the rest of the world uses and will continue to use. All this means is many programs will drop mac support like they have already done and some will be created as mac exclusive because no one wants to support both.
- vernie 7y agoIt seems like the rest of the world uses CUDA.
- baroffoos 7y agoThat was what I remember being the case years ago. I used to be tracking the progress of the blender project ans they where making some good progress on getting everything running on OpenCL because it works on all cards.
- pjmlp 7y agoOpenCL is only used by those that rather use C, instead of C++, Fortran, Julia, .NET, Java,... to target their GPUs, thanks PTX. Yes Open CL 2.x woke up to the fact that most researchers would rather use something else other than C, but too late and the driver support and debugging tools are still found lacking versus what NVidia and their partners offer. Even on mobiles, OpenCL doesn't have a say. After the initial support, iOS is all about Metal Compute, and Android has Renderscript.
- minimaxir 7y agoThe sheer frustration and potential undiscovered bugs of getting gaming to work with a GPU on a Mac caused me to give up trying to game on a desktop. Which is actually perfectly fine unless you need 4k60fps or 1440p144fps, which I do not. I originally started gaming on the PC a decade ago when many games and sales were PC only: the gaming market is at a place now where the game selection and prices between consoles and PCs are similar. There isn't anything on a PC/Mac I'm missing that I can't get on my PS4 Pro (or even a mobile device!).
- Filligree 7y ago- Factorio - Minecraft, w/so many hundred different mods - Kerbal Space Program - Oxygen Not Included - Mods in general, actually. - Elite: Dangerous. Or things which require joysticks in general. I could go on.
- nvrspyx 7y agoAll are true except Elite: Dangerous. It’s available on both Xbox One and PS4 and both consoles have joysticks available, which E:D supports.
- minimaxir 7y agoMore specifically, I don't play games that require a massive GPU. Most of those games can be played on simple GPUs and have a native Mac port.
- mhh__ 7y agoFPS games are a joke on console, if you're into shooty shooty bang-bang type games. In fairness, gaming has never (Last decade at least...) been the intended purpose of Mac
- Lowkeyloki 7y agoI don't know if they're a joke. There are quite a few players out there who seem to like it just fine. But I, on the other hand, am absolutely a joke trying to play FPS games with a controller. I need a keyboard and mouse or I can barely play at all. There are ways to hook up a keyboard and mouse to some consoles and some games, but it's generally considered "cheating". Doesn't matter anyway. My reflexes aren't what they were when I was a teenager.
- ladon86 7y agoI know this is about games, but I wanted to relay my experience using an eGPU (using the Razer enclosure and an AMD RX Vega 64) in a professional context. I had a good performance boost using Photoshop and Maya. But if you're using a portable MacBook Pro that you're connecting every day, I wouldn't recommend it. The connect/disconnect experience is really flaky, and you'll probably spend a few times a week trying to figure out why the eGPU isn't connecting/disconnecting. I switched to a Mac Mini at work (stock GPU build of course) with the same enclosure and graphics card, and the experience has been pretty delightful. If you're doing visual stuff, it's the budget version of a Mac Pro. It seemed to improve overall OSX responsiveness too, but perhaps that's just the new Mac Mini in action. I still use the old MacBook Pro at home, but it's not my daily machine. Now I don't have to carry a bag to work, and my home laptop can cover things in a pinch. Using a desktop machine at the office for work has improved my work-life balance, and my productivity.
- lioeters 7y ago> [Mac Mini] seemed to improve overall OSX responsiveness I'm betting that's due to the boot drive being PCIe-based storage.
- toxik 7y agoI actually see increased responsiveness on my MacBook Pro too, with an eGPU that is.
- rangibaby 7y agoI would say it's higher FPS due to the better GPU. It's hard to notice when you are using it, but if you use an older computer then one with a better GPU you'll notice the difference immediately
- 9oliYQjP 7y agoI've been using an eGPU (15" 2018 MBP i9, RX 580, 10.14.x) for over half a year and only ran into connect/disconnect issues once. If you're having disconnect issues I'd urge you to see if killing the QuickLookUIService process causes the eGPU to immediately disconnect. If it does, you probably have a buggy QuickLook plugin with one or more apps. In my case there was a QuickLook plugin from a recently installed trial app that was preventing the eGPU from disconnecting. I uninstalled the app and everything went back to normal. I've googled around and it appears like other people are also having this issue with QuickLookUIService. Hope this helps. I love my 2018 MBP + eGPU setup to the point that I chuckle whenever I see people claiming how awful these MBPs are. I've finally reached computing nirvana. The i9/32GB RAM in my MBP is powerful enough for me needs at home and on the go. The eGPU makes for a great dock and access to a more powerful GPU at home. It has built-in gigabit ethernet, an SSD, and several USB 3.1 ports.
- outworlder 7y agoNow if only Apple stopped crippling OpenGL in an affort to push Metal, maybe we would get better games. This is Microsoft's playbook from a couple of decades ago.
- jjcm 7y agoMoltenVK helps some of that, but I think it goes beyond supporting OpenGL. OSX just has so many things that cripple the gaming experience. Here at Atlassian we're pretty much a Mac only shop, and needless to say a lot of us play games as well. The amount of bugs we encounter with OSX compatibile games is stunning. The same game on the same laptop model on the same version of the OS will have two entirely different issues. We've gone so far as to dedicated the first hour of every LAN session we do to fixing OSX bugs. The consistent ones we experience though are input lag issues (i.e. to click and drag to select units, you have to click, wait half a second, then drag, otherwise the drag action will only select the last half of what you were trying to select), a lack of ability to minimize full screen apps meaning you have to close the game to change any setting or join a different discord channel (or do non-exclusive fullscreen, leading to a large drop in FPS), and a small subset of machines (about 1 in 10) that simply cannot go over 20FPS regardless of resolution/rendering settings/game selection. It's surprising given how good the mobile gaming experience is on iOS devices. It just isn't a priority on OSX whatsoever, and the UX of it shows.
- month13 7y agoApple's terrible handling of OpenGL has been around before Metal was a thing, doubt we'll see a turnaround anytime soon.
- skocznymroczny 7y agoOpenGL is in maintenance state on all platforms basically. The only alternative they had was Vulkan. And Vulkan is not perfect either. Personally I prefer Metal to Vulkan. It's very easy to transition from OpenGL to Metal, it feels like an improved API without global state and packing stuff into structs. Meanwhile Vulkan opens the whole low-level can of worms on you and you suddenly have to worry about memory barriers, image transitions, semaphores/synchronization, even in the simplest of applications.
- antimatter 7y agoAnyone know the type of mouse being used in the photo? https://justin.searls.co/uploads/egpu/IMG_4122.jpg https://justin.searls.co/uploads/egpu/IMG_4122.jpg
- twodayslate 7y agoLogitech’s?
- LurkerAtTheGate 7y agoLooks like a J-Tech Digital V628
- bitL 7y agoThis NVidia stuff is getting ridiculous. Apple basically killed off any Deep Learning enthusiasts and nobody could do any serious computing-intense stuff on their platform. A polished toy.
- thstart 7y agoMay be because Apple would release ML hardware soon?
- thstart 7y agoMay be because se Apple would release ML hardware soon?
- burn_cycle 7y agoIt is indeed very frustrating, especially for those of us who bought Pascal cards before they stopped "working". In the end only the customers suffer.
- wjakob 7y agoThe extra-painful part about this whole situation is that it's apparently only due to Apple blocking NVIDIA from signing and publishing their drivers. (for whatever bizarre reason they may have to do that)
- soganess 7y agoI know it stinks for the people who are acustom to Nvidia's workflow, but it is quite hard to feel bad for Nvidia. A bigger fish is doing to them what they do to smaller players. Nvidia blocks the Nouveau drivers from working properly on Maxwell2 or newer cards: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Nouveau-XDC2017 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Nouveau-...
- judge2020 7y agoRelated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18834715 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18834715
- afturner 7y agoI follow Justin on Twitter and just wanna say he's awesome
- servercobra 7y agoI've been using an eGPU for about 6 months now with my 2018 13in Macbook Pro and I love it. It drives my 4k monitor so much better for work tasks, and gaming is fun. The only issue is the eject never seems to actually work, so I just unplug the eGPU every time rather than safely eject. It's a bit annoying to have every app reboot when unplugging. I'm hoping the next version handles it a bit better. One change I've made from the article is installing Windows on an external M2 drive over USB-C (I don't believe it's Thunderbolt, just standard USB) because my Macbook was running out of space between Windows and MacOS..looking at you, Ark and your ridiculous 100GB install with another 100GB of scratch space required to update.. Everything seems to work at full speed!
- 9oliYQjP 7y agoIn case it helps, you might want to see my comments about QuickLookUIService preventing seamless eGPU disconnects here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20340602 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20340602
- draw_down 7y ago> And that's it. On macOS, this is all truly plug-and-play. Worth highlighting, I think.
- jacquesc 7y agoLoved this post. But I'd recommend to not try this at home. You'll end up spending way too much money, and wasting way too much time. Just grab a PC or console for gaming. Trying to game on a Mac is just swimming upstream, without the payoff. Apple does not want you.
- pifuoweiuf983 7y agoNot really. Apple supports EGPU's natively, and they also have native drivers for AMD cards. Literally plug and play on MacOS. On Windows, depending on which Mac you have it ranges from plug and play (update drivers) to basically what the author wrote here.
- Shivetya 7y agoIf you do not mind being locked into AMD cards only I suppose it is a good solution. The eGPU solution was probably the only way to save face with Apple's fixation on slimness limiting their choice of onboard GPUs. If you look at the situation Apple design locked themselves into, the inability to swap out components and for many models you cannot even upgrade the memory, has forced users to rely on external boxes for storage and graphics which pretty much brings back in worse form all those boxes Apple was "designing away". I like my current Apple computer but I am discouraged from every buying another first for their support of manufacturing in China and for the fact that every time I hit some limit imposed by their fixation the sycophants chant "just use external" and I am back to square one.
- vincnetas 7y agoYes, but most of the games are on win, and egpu's on bootcamp are not so P&P. Been there, done that. Lots of wasted time :( [edit] especialy enoying "Error 12". As article mentions: There is a really good chance, however, that you'll see a yellow exclamation point over the GPU's icon, and instead of "This device is working properly", you'll be greeted by "Error 12" and a message that the device doesn't have sufficient resources (read: either memory addressing or bandwidth) to be used. If you see this, your GPU won't engage at all, and you'll have to troubleshoot it. There are a bunch of ideas in this thread, but what will work for you depends on a combination of factors.
- whytaka 7y agoI gamed a bit on my previous MBP, a 15" from 2012. The CPU and GPU got so hot, I suspect it reduced the lifespan of the laptop battery. Does anyone else have concerns about this for gaming on laptops? Would unloading to the EGPU mitigate this issue?
- Marsymars 7y agoThis was a concern for me trying to play ~2005-era games on macOS on a 12" MacBook. One of the reasons I offloaded to Steam streaming and stream from my Windows HTPC now.
- mastazi 7y agoThe writer is pretending that egpu is some sort of hidden secret that no one wants you to know about, I don’t understand why - since this is not the case - many companies are actively marketing egpu solutions. It also falsely presents egpu as a silver bullet, in particular it claims that there is no latency even when using the laptop’s built-in monitor (as opposed to an external monitor plugged into the GPU) which is absolutely not true (an external monitor will perform better). Many reliable sources have published independent benchmarks comparing the 3 solutions (internal gpu, external gpu over internal monitor, external gpu over external monitor) you should look at the benchmarks in case you want to make up your own mind about this topic.
- pifuoweiuf983 7y agoYeah, not to mention MacOS has native support for EGPUs
- robotresearcher 7y agoQuoting the article: “Why an external monitor? While both macOS and Windows can "loopback" frames rendered by the eGPU over the cable and onto the computer's built-in monitor, operating system support for this is very recent and it introduces a nonzero bandwidth cost which can result in lower framerates as well as frames being dropped.”
- mastazi 7y agoFair point, there is another section of the article that seems to suggest otherwise, but this section that you quoted addresses it so I take my comment back.
- elif 7y agoGaming on Mac is okay if you have a good time manually editing files with magic strings from the internet to trick the OS into using an appropriate resolution/refresh rate, and ultimately ending up with noticable input lag. I went from gaming on a $6k mac pro to gaming on a $1k Alienware and realized I'd been playing in the kids pool the whole time.
- hamstergene 7y agoI would refrain from saying "gaming on MacBook" because it creates confusion about whether one is using Windows or macOS. When playing on Windows (Bootcamp) the MacBook is just a regular Intel based hardware, the experience is no different from using any other laptop out there (aside from Windows install process). Playing on macOS that's another story. Mouse acceleration can not be disabled, switching to and from fullscreen games is sometimes buggy, and not many popular names are available natively on macOS.
- jvzr 7y agoTangentially, I know of killmouseaccel[1] which does exactly what it says: disables mouse acceleration on macOS. However, it needs to be executed at every restart, or deamonized. [1] https://github.com/docwhat/killmouseaccel https://github.com/docwhat/killmouseaccel
- frou_dh 7y agoSteerMouse, among other things, has a nice total bypass for it. Here, I am just using the raw DPI and linear movement of my mouse: https://i.imgur.com/xEEjjVD.png https://i.imgur.com/xEEjjVD.png http://plentycom.jp/en/steermouse/ http://plentycom.jp/en/steermouse/ They have a more focused product too, but I haven't tried that personally: http://plentycom.jp/en/cursorsense/ http://plentycom.jp/en/cursorsense/ --- As I understand it, Windows too has mouse-acceleration that remains (rather subtly) even after disabling "Enhance pointer precision" in Control Panel. When I was into competitive gaming, there was a Registry fix doing the rounds that got rid of it completely.
- forrestthewoods 7y agoI’ve yet to see an eGPU review measure latency. I’ve always been skeptical of their ability to render frames out with adding meaningful latency to the system. I know it’s theoretical possible to work just fine. But it’s a long pipeline with lots of opportunity for inefficiency and connection bugs. I love my 144Hz gaming monitor on my desktop. I’d be thrilled to connect my laptop to an eGPU if it can produce an identical gaming experience. But my spidey sense says eGPu’s are a convoluted buggy mess. And that’s unlikely to change in the foreseeable future due to lack of users.
- Shihan 7y agoI had a eGPU box with a GTX 1060 for months, but was using it for Windows 10 and a zbook 15 notebook. Unfortunately there is no Mac support for NVIDIA but some users get it working themselves - never tried it as it looked a bit to cumbersome for my taste. On Windows 10 the setup worked great. Was able to play games like PUBG or Quake Champions with decent (Medium) settings at Full HD and a reasonable framerate (I believe usually 70-90 FPS). But in the end I decided that I wanted to switch away from Apple and also sold my Laptop to buy a Desktop PC with more horsepower. My wife still has a rather new MacBook Pro, so if I want to fire up some Final Cut Pro or Garage bend I could still do it. Was not sure if the whole setup of eGPU was worth it for me, it surely allowed me to play those titles which were not playable without the eGPU but I believe it would have been wiser to spent the money directly on a new PC. But of course, with switching away from the Mac my case is a bit special.
- simonCGN 7y agoIs a eGPU setup sufficient for running a Oculus Rift S?
- jammygit 7y agoWhat’s the easiest way to turn your desktop to a Remote Desktop for ssh (eg, to run ml models)? The dynamic ip is the only weird part. Which service or solution do people use?
- figiel 7y agoNot sure if I understand the issue completely but if you have problem with the dynamic IP addresses in LAN and don't want to fix the addresses you can use .local domains (this works in Apple and Linux worlds, in Windows you need LLMNR), i.e. connect to yourhostname.local instead of 192.168.x.somerandomnumber.
- rarecoil 7y agoNot brought up here, but the Apple Thunderbolt 2 -> Thunderbolt 3 adapter is one of the only ones that actually works in reverse, too. With some hacks from eGPU.io, I ran an Nvidia GTX 1060 on a Mac Mini for a while over TB2 for hashcat work.
- timeimp 7y agoI have a mid-2013 MBP with TB2. If I get a TB2 -> TB3 then this should work ok?
- rarecoil 7y agoIt should. You'll need to run a script such as this: https://egpu.io/forums/mac-setup/script-enable-egpu-on-tb1-2-macs-on-macos-10-13-4/ https://egpu.io/forums/mac-setup/script-enable-egpu-on-tb1-2...
- writepub 7y agoApple doesn't seem to have it's ear to the ground. Ever since windows 10, the software and design advantage Apple had over PCs has arguably narrowed down to irrelevance. Windows today boasts of good design, higher security than previous versions, a Microsoft supported full blown embedded Linux (WSL) and a much larger selection of apps/tools It all comes down to specs and build quality in 2019. If one is paying top of the line for Apple, they better ship decent spec-ed hardware, including GPU
- kkarakk 7y agoCan anyone chime in on WHY apple doesn't care about the gaming segment? Is it just elitism from the design/dev team or do they truly think no one wants to game on a mac? It's strange behavior for a company.
- vnchr 7y agoI wonder how much of it is history. Steve Jobs initially rejected the idea of gaming on the iPhone. They opened their arms only when mobile game revenue became impossible to ignore.
- slavik81 7y ago"The truth is Steve Jobs doesn't care about games. [....] He's not a gamer. [....] It's difficult to ask somebody to get behind something they don't really believe in. I mean obviously he believes in the music and the iTunes and that whole side of things, and the media side of things, and he gets it and he pushes it and they do wonderful things with that, but he's not a gamer. That's just the bottom line about it." ~John Carmack (2008)
- TheRealDunkirk 7y agoI tried this with a Mac eGPU Dev Kit and a 2014 MBPr... right before they removed the ability to run it with a TB2 cable. Jerks. Anyway, the amount of hassle with trying this is high, and I say that as someone who ran Linux on all my desktops and servers from '94-'14. Installing Windows on Bootcamp to do this? That's a hard pass from me, dawg. I'm done with Windows. Even for gaming. It's all Mac-native or Playstation for me now.