[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Are EGPUs for M1/M2 MacBook's Possible?
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Ask HN: Are EGPUs for M1/M2 MacBook's Possible?
Three things: 1) 2D acceleration with the recent Rust driver in
Asahi Linux seems quite attainable, and will enable
everyday/office/development use. 2) USB 4 should allow suitable
bandwidth for an eGPU 3) What needs to happen to support say, an
Nvidia RTX 3090 in an eGPU case/dock? I'm thinking the 'open
source' Nvidia driver needs to be compiled for ARM, and everything
pushed to it is code for the internal ISA of the GPU. 3D
acceleration through an eGPU seems much more possible in the near-
term than supporting the internal iGPU of the M1/M2.
Author : thrwawy74
Score : 9 points
Date : 2022-10-08 21:59 UTC (1 hours ago)
| oneplane wrote:
| It's definitely possible, but there are no drivers released by
| the GPU manufacturers. They may simply not see any benefit of
| making such an investment, and they might point a finger at Apple
| for not allowing them the ease of development using kernel access
| (they would have to make a DEXT or something like that). It's
| also likely that there isn't really much of a market for it
| anymore.
| rektide wrote:
| To be clear, there really shouldnt need to be support for egpus
| specifically. Its just that MacOS, being run on almost entirely
| fixed hardware with off-brand/custom apis (Metal) isnt
| attractive for gpu makers in any capacity.
|
| Otoh on Linux it should just work!
| [deleted]
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| I have never seen a single review or benchmark of eGPUs that was
| impressive.
| rektide wrote:
| I've never seen a review that had any real issue with them?
| They performed fine everywhere I saw.
| Apreche wrote:
| There isn't ever going to be official support for it, that's for
| sure. As for unofficial support, it's going to take some nerds to
| put that together. It could be you! Go buy one and start working
| on it. Let us know how it goes. I'm sure you can get a lot of
| enthusiastic people to help you.
|
| Personally, I think a better and easier option is to just get an
| entire other computer with the GPU(s) in it. This can either be a
| physical machine you have, or some GPU cloud instance. Then in
| situations where the Mac graphics capabilities aren't up to
| snuff, you can use something like remote desktop or streaming to
| offload that work to the other machine.
|
| e.g.: Setup a small headless PC on your network that has a
| powerful GPU and Steam installed. Then run Steam Link on your Mac
| to play games that don't run natively on MacOS.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| I was under the impression that the obstacles were at least
| partly a MacOS issue, because people have encountered
| difficulties running eGPUs on Intel Macs as well. Would love to
| hear if/how this is working in the field.
| oneplane wrote:
| It works fine on Intel Macs with supported hardware, but after
| a bit no new updates came for newer GPUs and because the
| corporate relation between Apple and Nvidia got shot to the
| around the 8600/8800 GPU series debacle, the only eGPUs that
| work on macOS on Intel were AMD gpus.
|
| You could run Windows and use GPUs there, but on ARM that's a
| different story, there don't seem to be any Windows or macOS
| drivers at all, except for Linux.
|
| So would it work hardware-wise? Yep. But no official software
| is being made to do it because none of the parties that could
| are incentivised to do so.
| minimaul wrote:
| marcan (working on linux on these devices) has talked about this
| on twitter previously. tl;dr is that while it is kinda
| technically possible, it would require a lot of changes to
| existing software and might result in nasty performance issues
| that could make the whole idea not worth it.
|
| https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1534825580801433600
| uni_rule wrote:
| Considering the status of GPUs on hackintosh systems / the Mac
| Pro I am under the impression that no Nvidia cards after Pascal
| are supported by MacOS and the ones that are are via various
| kludges dredging drivers from High Sierra upwards to new versions
| via OpenCore. Officially, MacOS is firmly in Radeon territory
| when it comes to dgpus.
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