Nvidia options for eGPU for Mac?

Aabacus

Looking to build an eGPU solution for my Mac. Is there a guide or site or recommendation for which card and enclosure to use? (New 2019 iMac with USB-C/T3)

thanks!!!

nemesis10

Aabacus said:

Looking to build an eGPU solution for my Mac. Is there a guide or site or recommendation for which card and enclosure to use? (New 2019 iMac with USB-C/T3)

thanks!!!

There are none... because there are no available Nvidia drivers.

kenshaw011267

You have to have a Mac with an OS of High Sierra or earlier. Yours has Mojave and cannot instakll any Nvidia drivers. Your only options are to switch to 3Delight, deal with CPU Iray renders or see if you can downgrade the OS to High Sierra, which I'm fairly sure won't be possible.

mclaugh

kenshaw011267 said:

You have to have a Mac with an OS of High Sierra or earlier. Yours has Mojave and cannot instakll any Nvidia drivers. Your only options are to switch to 3Delight, deal with CPU Iray renders or see if you can downgrade the OS to High Sierra, which I'm fairly sure won't be possible.

It's difficult but possible (TL/DR version: you have to boot in target disk mode and install from another Mac), but .. and it's a BIG but ... High Sierra won't have drivers for new hardware and hardware that's been upgraded may be crippled, so it ain't worth it.

@Aabacus – two issues: Mojave (and Catalina) only provide EGPU support for a (very) small subset of AMD GPUs and don't even provide support for older, factory installed, NVIDIA GPUs; and NVIDIA hasn't released (and probably won't) drivers for Mojave (or Catalina). See State of EGPU for Macs—Mojave 10.14 Update for more info.

Essentially, you have three options: skip the egpu and stick with 3DL rendering; run High Sierra in a vm (you'll probably need to patch the egpu drivers to get the vm to recognize them, though, and the overhead for the vm is going to exact a massive performance hit); or boot Windows 10 from an external drive and run DS from there.

Bottom line: unless and until Tim Cook gets over his snit with NVIDIA, running NVIDIA GPUs natively in MacOS ain't happening.

bytescapes

Aabacus said:

Looking to build an eGPU solution for my Mac. Is there a guide or site or recommendation for which card and enclosure to use? (New 2019 iMac with USB-C/T3)

The site that you want to look at is egpu.io, which has detailed information about eGPUs, and offers several solutions for Macs.

That said, as @mclaugh reported, the situation is not good with respect to newer Macs running Mojave (or, in future, Catalina). Nvidia have not released drivers for their graphics cards that are compatible with Mojave (probably because Apple seems determined not to support or encourage use of Nvidia cards). If you want to run an eGPU, you'll need to drop back to High Sierra (which you won't want to do on a newer Mac).

It might be possible to use Bootcamp to boot Windows on your Mac and use the eGPU that way. Again, eGPU.io is the place to go to see how other people have got on with that. My impression is that it's a struggle to make that work as well.

kenshaw011267

I have doubts about using Bootcamp. Running Win10 in a VM using Parallels might be possible. I know people who do that to make Win only software run on their Macs.

bytescapes

kenshaw011267 said:

I have doubts about using Bootcamp. Running Win10 in a VM using Parallels might be possible. I know people who do that to make Win only software run on their Macs.

I'm one of those people: I use Windows 10 under Parallels to run Mojoworld and Bryce (and if, as I expect, Carrara proves to be incompatible with Catalina, I'll probably end up moving Carrara into the VM as well). Works great.

I haven't tried using an eGPU from within Windows-under-Parallels, although that's an experiment I could potentially try. I'd actually be surprised if it worked better than Bootcamp. A Mac booted into Windows via Bootcamp is, to most intents and purposes, an Intel/Windows PC. With Windows under Parallels, you're dealing with layers of abstraction and emulation, any one of which could potentially mess up your chances of making the already-temperamental eGPU setup work.

The relevant page at eGPU says: "Boot Camp eGPU setup on a Mac can be plug-and-play for some and a total nightmare for others" which sounds much like what I'd expect.

rsharp_3144816

kenshaw011267 said:

I have doubts about using Bootcamp. Running Win10 in a VM using Parallels might be possible. I know people who do that to make Win only software run on their Macs.

But one's Mac would still not have an nVidia graphics card.  The VM software just taps into whatever hardware you have on your Mac.

kenshaw011267

But each VM has its own drivers. The difference between Bootcamp and Parallels is that when you setup and maintain the Windows VM you can install the drivers you need, this of course assumes Parallels works similiarly to VMware with which I have far more experience.

rsharp_3144816

kenshaw011267 said:

But each VM has its own drivers. The difference between Bootcamp and Parallels is that when you setup and maintain the Windows VM you can install the drivers you need, this of course assumes Parallels works similiarly to VMware with which I have far more experience.

If your Mac has an AMD GPU, how would either boot camp or a VM solution have the ability to work with CUDA?  nVidia drives require nVidia hardware, no?

kenshaw011267

rsharp said:

kenshaw011267 said:

But each VM has its own drivers. The difference between Bootcamp and Parallels is that when you setup and maintain the Windows VM you can install the drivers you need, this of course assumes Parallels works similiarly to VMware with which I have far more experience.

If your Mac has an AMD GPU, how would either boot camp or a VM solution have the ability to work with CUDA?  nVidia drives require nVidia hardware, no?

The discussion is about making a Mac work with an external Nvidia GPU.