Anyone Using A Mac With Thunderbolt And An eGPU For DS?

VitalBodies

Anyone Using A Mac With USB4 or Thunderbolt And An eGPU For DS? 
There is the option of an external Thunderbolt GPU case (eGPU) for an Nvidia card for rendering iRay. 
I am pretty out of the loop on the current state of DazStudio on a Mac (in general) so comments about that would be useful too. 
 

I personally have an M1 Mac Mini with USB4 & Thunderbolt. 

tsroemi

I tried for the longest time to get an external NVidia card to play nice with a Mac but finally gave up. You'd have to go way back to a previous Mac OS version (forgot which exactly), because Mac refuses to work with NVidia cards at all these days. I seem to remember NVidia and Apple had a falling out about something or other. 
There's a specific DS on a Mac thread around here somewhere which will tell you all you need to know.

Mark_e593e0a5

As far as I am aware, eGPU's on an M1 machine are NOT supported at all by Apple. Only on those old Intel boxes.

I am using an iMac Pro with a Gigabyte RTX 3090 eGPU connected via Thunderbolt-3. While macOS recognizes an eGPU plugged in, it is not supported as macOS Nvidia drivers are not available. Using Bootcamp with Win10 is a different story. Works like nicely, but not as fast as a system-native GPU. The Thunderbolt connection slows things down a bit. 

Richard Haseltine

Even if the hardware worked there is no Mac driver for nVida cards recent enough to work with the version of Iray in current or recent builds of Daz Studio.

VitalBodies

Ok, thanks everybody. Seems like it could have been a nice way to go in some ways.