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What I always find fascinating is so many of these tech youtubers have tunnel-vision when it comes to the laptop as a professional tool. They only look at it as a video editing rig....because they're all video editors, I guess. Newsflash: Most laptop users aren't video editors. Some of us are architects, industrial & mechanical engineers, designers etc, etc. I use an eGPU with a Quadro card because I'm a solidworks user. With that setup connected to my XPS 9310 (which obvs uses TB4), it's amazing how capable that machine is. So, maybe eGPUs don't have future in Apple ecosystem, but that doesn't mean they're dead.

People didn’t buy an e-gpu for video editing, but for gaming.... its only in the mind of most streamers that video editing performance is more important then gaming performance...

For me, an eGPU in 2021 is still attractive. This is because I already own a laptop. It’s dramatic how fast graphics technology evolves - when I bought this machine in 2017 the 4GB card seemed more than enough. Today, not so. And yet, an eGPU and GPU can supercharge my laptop for a quarter of the price of either a new PC, or a new laptop. We might all be stunned when Apple’s new Macs arrive, but something tells me there won’t be won’t widespread support for Windows gaming on the Mac right out of the gate. As it stands, I’m glad the eGPU option is still around as an option for someone in my situation, but for anyone buying a new laptop or desktop today, the choice is obvious.

What impacted the potential proliferation of eGPUs was the rarity of thunderbolt 3 ports on laptops. However, even with Apple dropping Mac support, the higher bandwidth thunderbolt 4 port will be ubiquitous on all 11th gen intel CPU powered laptops. This means a huge increase in the potential market (customers) for eGPUs. We may see Thunderbolt 4 optimized eGPUs becoming much more common.

I noticed the same issue with FCP, I was having dropped frames on 60 frame footage but when I unplugged the gpu my integrated intel graphics played it back with no issues

Bought the MacBook Air because of you - best device I have ever bought! Thanks!

Shoutout to your Appleinsider days! You guys have come a long way!

It seems as if Apple doesn’t want to take the focus off the M1 by (easily) supporting eGPUs with simple OS-level support in Big Sur, or take the focus off the M1s 8 GPU cores. Apple may fear that allowing eGPUs (for now) might run the risk of suggesting that the M1 is in any way deficient. (FWIW, rumor has it that the 14 and/or the 16 inch M[?] MacBook Pros will have native PCIe 3 support…)

These videos remind me of Bevis and Butthead kicking a 20k server. “Hehe why are you so slow, hehe uhh”

I think there will eventually be some standardized solution for external PCIe. This would allow for your GPU to do double duty for both your desktop and laptop when needed.

It's too bad, an eGPU module the shape of the Mac mini would be fantastic. Love my new M1 mini, but would really appreciate a bit more gpu power.

I was looking for info about eGPU for a long time. This is the first video that answer all of my questions about eGPU. Many thanks.

At the moment I am getting better results with my Mac mini 2018 (64 GB RAM, i5 model) and an eGPU with Vega 64 than I am getting with the MacBook Air M1 (16 GB RAM) in video editing. I think that will change in the future so next time I buy a new computer, I won't need the eGPU. But think that is some years further down the road, are happy with my set up at the moment.

Just ordered my Mac Mini , Cant't wait! thanks for your videos for helping me on my choice.

eGPUs require drivers. Apple simply won’t spend the money to create drivers for them.

I remember following you guys back in @appleinsider then, slowly transition to this channel

Guys, I’m a subscriber and watch every video you show. But don’t you think there’s just so many videos you can make on Mac M1? I counted 37 so far... didn’t count iPhones or air max. I say this with love, really want you guys to thrive, and also eager for more content that you make so well

Apple not supporting eGPUs is far from the end of eGPUs in general. It's just the end for Apple users where that was important to them. Still benefits in other use cases and devices: content creation is not the only reason to have GPU power. It makes it a hard pass for me getting a Mac anytime soon.

Welcome to the party pal. You're on the conveyor belt, now. Start walking. They'll have you running soon enough.

Rip in the chat ;(

Very interesting video! Thanks for sharing! I understand that with new M1 macbooks eGPUs could slow down CURRENT performances, but what about new connection possibilities? maybe there will be at some point a faster connection than the Thunderbolt, no?

Just because it’s slower in video editing doesn’t mean it’s bad or dead. The future could have even more faster ports with more power with multiple channels allowing more data with huge bandwidth. We haven’t yet reached the

great video... wondering, do you think apple silicons will be able to match Nvidia/AMD graphics for professionals? or apple will never be competitive to 3D industry again

Great video overview guys!

Man the content you put out is just amazing. Quantity and quality. Good job!

Theoretically you could still connect a egpu as I believe that the m1 macs still have thunderbolt, however as far as I am aware nvidia, amd and Intel don't have arm drivers for their desktop gpus

EGPUs are still limited by the thunderbolt bandwidth, fortunately its evolving with other technologies.

ROG flow 13 is perfect kind of laptop for an eGPU.

I can see external graphics card enclosures remaining useful, but not for graphics. Similar to how some tasks are better performed using a cluster of Raspberry Pis than a single PC or Mac that is overall more powerful, there are other tasks that graphics cards are useful for where more is always better. Things like Bitcoin mining & distributed computing - BOINC, Folding@home, etc. - i.e. eGPUs won’t be used for streaming graphics from the CPU back to the display, but they will be used for “dumping” computational models onto graphics cards, letting them run the process at hand, and then getting the results back once they’ve completed.

But what about multi-monitor support? I use eGPU so i can hook up 4 external monitors @ 4k. Currently none of the M1 chip macs could support more than 2 external monitors

The reason egpus are not good for what you showed is because of the overall bandwidth mainly, and latency secondly. The thunderbolt 3 standard only contains 4 pcie lanes, which is a bottleneck for all the rest of the system and it causes latency because, as you mentioned, the same amount of data needs to travel the same route with a quarter of the bandwidth, so it takes more time, creating latency. BUT if intel releases thunderbolt 5 or 6 or whatever with the option of containing 16 pcie lanes, this latency will just disappear because the bottleneck i mentioned earlier won't be. So the problem you mentioned is solveable! Especially with pcie gen 4, every lane has double the bandwidth of gen 3 so even with 8 lanes thunderbolt will have the bandwidth of 16 gen 3 lanes (4 times the performance it has now without too much complexity, eliminating any latency)

What about the ROG flow 13? I think that is the perfect setup for an e gpu

For raytracing applications however, an eGPU is still better because they offload all the data to the GPU in a one-time operation, and then the GPU crunches on that data. It's not back and forth like video editing.

I love your content ...... THANK Youyou so much for all this Awesome information .....I love my M1 MacBook Pro ......thank you Mikey

I'm having second thoughts about purchasing an Apple laptop due to its GPU's inadequate support for the Unreal Engine application, and with the recent news that they're discontinuing support for external GPUs, I've made the decision to permanently part ways with Apple.

Well explained video. Thank you so much!

With the M1 macs supporting thunderbolt 4 for 40GB/s transfer speed it could not be as big of a drop from egpu's as past systems have had.

Thunderbolt 5 coming to the rescue.

yes I bought an eGPU 1 month ago and I sold it back within 2 weeks, totally not worth it

in conclusion the new rog 13 that comes with a 3080 egpu already fixed the bottleneck with a custom port connector

Until the bandwidth limitation of 40Gbps issue is resolved then yes it will likely cease to exist. Even thunderbolt 4 is still stuck at 40Gbps

May I ask if the mac will work even if I don't connect a monitor? Will it affect performance? Thank you

Video editing yes, but for a 3D motion graphics designer eGPUs were a godsend. GPU render engines seem to be trendy now, and Apple kicked the whole industry to use buggy-as-hell Windowses.

Thanks, that’s useful to know. I use an eGpu on my 16” MBP to run extra screens and to offload processes like noise reduction and 3D rendering. It’s faster than the 16” by itself for those. I’m eagerly waiting for the M1X 16” to come out, but worry about multiple external screen support. Are there any rumours about that yet?

It may well be dead for the Mac world, but in no way is it even close to dead in the Windows world, particularly in the business environment and for many people working from home, where it allows creative professionals to use portable ultrabooks with high quality high resolution screens (Gaming laptops are generally geared towards high refresh 1080 displays) which can then just dock with a eGPU station hot desk and get instant graphics performance and multi monitor support.

Thx 4 the good content!

Can you guys cover the issue about the M1 Macs bricking after using the PD port on multi port hubs? 🙏🙏

I do disagree. TB3 uses PCI GEN 3 4x (TB4 too). But with pci gen 4 they will soon be able to double the data rate, running a gpu basically on 8x gen 3 speed. Considering only very high-end gpus slightly exceed 8x gen 3 speeds TB will definitely not die. External and cooled gpus will ALWAYS outperform internal graphics. Thunderbolt 5 will be a game changer with double the bandwidth and lower latency. Apple might drop pci e support for real graphicscards completely. But because they will probably replace the Mac pro with a dedicated gpu I don't think so. They might still drop it though for laptops. But when max performance is key, proper cooling is absolutely necessary! For this reason I guess apple will offer a solution, maybe completely inhouse. The rest of the industry will stick with pci and thunderbolt for max performance in light laptops. Create a problem, then sell the solution, that's apples Motto!

I agree with you that the bandwidth will cause issue in tasks such as video rendering or even gaming. However, there are other things that can only be done on the external GPUs. For example, training a large neural network that requires a huge chunk of GPU ram. Although the M1 SOC is impressive, by the end of the day, you cannot beat physics. The idea of distribute some heavy load to a separate computation module is still useful, given a low demand on the latency and bandwidth. I think apple just need to work with AMD to release the GPU drivers.

egpus was before thunderbolt 3! it was kinda tricky to get working but they worked and realy good

I reused the 5700xt in my egpu enclose in a new virtualization server so I could run Big Sur on unraid. It’s overall a much less janky setup. I don’t think I’ll miss the old stop l setup. I do hope new MacBooks have support for 4+ monitors though…

So because apple dropped the eGPU support all eGPUs are dead? No. You see, other laptop brands still exist out there. While apple holds a sizeable part of the market, just because they don't support them anymore, other brands still have their fair share of laptops with support. While it is a bummer to not have support anymore, but most people still have other laptops WITH support, so i think that eGPUs will not die out

only programmers and coders knows what went wrong, basically in short, apple told it's coders to no longer support eGPU for marketing purposes

Irony is that my M1 MacBook Air eliminated the need of an eGPU. I'd originally looked into an eGPU for my Windows PC in order to do 4K timelines in DaVinci Resolve without having to use 1/4 proxies to even get close to realtime playback during edit. Tuns out that the USB-C connector was 3.2 USB, but not Thunderbolt 3. Now I'm not missing it at all.

You make very valid points. My concern is with bootcamp gone and now EGPU support gone AAA gaming is basically dead on the Mac. It seems like Apple is betting everything on AAA developers coding for the Mac or maybe buying up some studios...which is far from a sure thing. As far as streaming services, I think USA’a spotty broadband coverage doesn’t make it a good solution either. Which is why I’m going to rock an EGPU on my MacBook Pro 16” when graphics cards become available again ;-).

I agree. eGPUs made sense when the only available GPU on your laptop was weak Intel Integrated graphics such as a UHD 630. eGPUs are also at a disadvantage compared with laptops that include a discrete GPU, such as the MacBook Pro 16, as the internal discrete GPU typically connects to the CPU with 8 or more PCi data lanes, where a Thunderbolt 3 port has a max bandwidth of 4 PCi data lanes. The M1 chip provides an early indication of how good integrated GPUs could become on Apple Silicon M series processors, and I even wonder if Apple will also get rid of discrete GPUs in their entire laptop product range, and only use them in their desktop MACs. The closer you can get the GPU to the CPU the lower the latency with performance gains. It then becomes a thermal management tradeoff issue as you are starting to concentrate a lot processing performance with power consumption and associated thermal load into an exceedingly small space.

I don't think it's up to apple to support egpus because it already has the Thunderbolt 4 ports. It's AMD and Nvidia that have to write the drivers 🤔

Sounds like bad news for Mac gamers like me. I want to stay in Mac OS, but inability to use an eGPU (or boot camp) seems like a real future deterrent for me. Unless Mac's will actually get good graphics performance for gaming... (I'm not holding my breath). Damnit, now I'm all depressed! :(

Every thing looks fine with tests, but heat. eGPU heats own radiator, CPU can work on higher speeds in this case. A lot of gaming laptops has throttle issues.

My EGPU with 5700xt is serving me well with my 2020 13 inch MBP. Does what I need it to when it comes to animation, editing, and bootcamp gaming (like hitman 3 with the highest settings, playing on my MBP is a trip to me). Shame to not see it be supported with newer M1 macs.

Can you add more than one graphic card to the razer? If so what would that process be ? Thanks in advance!

Man I want to buy a Macbook M1 but no egpu support is a deal killer for me

Seems you were right... sadly. I wish I could use my RTX via eGPU with my new M1 Max to help rendering 3D.

As they say, “An apple a year, makes your money disappear...”

Great job!

Sony Vaio Z came with a egpu (non changeable) in 2011 I think. Why not use that as the historic example, it is the 10 year anniversary after all.

This video gets a lot wrong. 1.) The reason why the 2019 MBP performed so well in video editing, even without an eGPU, was because of the media engine running on the T2 SoC co-processor. The problem with that is it's codec specific, just like the M series processor's media engines…which are basically updated and integrated versions of the same functionality. Even with the M series chips, If you're using a codec that it doesn't have support for, you're going to have a bad time. The 5500 and 5600 M were also pretty impressive chips from AMD. 2.) Thunderbolt didn't just automatically start introducing latency in 2019. It was always an x4 PCIe connection, and prior to Thunderbolt 3, it was HALF speed, at 20Gb/s per port / PCIe 2.0 speeds. The original Thunderbolt v1 was only PCIe 1...So that's only 10Gb/s per port! Most of the time, you don't need an insane amount of bandwidth going to the discreet GPU, unless you are swapping a ton of data in and out of VRAM / RAM and you're also hitting the CPU. It really depends on what you're doing. 3.) With the M series chips, Apple didn't just ditch eGPUs, they ditched ALL discreet graphics. There's no more support for ANY discreet GPU (that is any GPU with its own dedicated memory) anymore, it doesn't matter if it's an eGPU or if it's soldered to the board and has the full PCI express x16 bandwidth. This means that if there is a future Mac Pro with Apple Silicon that has PCI Express slots, it won't support graphics cards...I honestly wouldn't be surprised if they brought back the trash can form factor. In fact, I'm calling it now. This is my prediction, lol. There's really no reason for high bandwidth PCI Express slots on Mac OS, outside of graphics. Mac OS doesn't support RDMA, so 100 Gb/s ethernet wouldn't work, neither would Infiniband or any other RDMA based networking technology. 64 Gb/s Fibre Channel would basically be IT, and there's not too many people that are still using Macs that would need access to SAN storage at those speeds. Definitely not enough to justify creating a tower workstation with PCIe slots that can't house graphics cards. 4.) From Apple's perspective, there are a lot of benefits to leaving discreet GPUs in the past. It simplifies _everything_, it lowers costs significantly, and not just because they don't have to buy chips from AMD or Nvidia anymore, but it also decreases complexity for board designs. They don't need MUX chips, they don't need to worry about switching between the integrated gfx and the discreet gfx. It saves battery life as well. It even simplifies the software, the drivers and frameworks. But...at the end of the day -- here's the problem... Apple's own in house graphics tech isn't anywhere near what AMD or NVidia has. It's just not. It's entirely possible that it's not even anywhere near what Intel has to offer with their new discreet gfx cards. We'll have to wait and see with that, but they should be out soon. 5.) From my own personal perspective, I think it really makes sense for a desktop to have modular upgradeable graphics. It sucks to be stuck with the same graphics that the computer came with for its entire lifetime. For a laptop, fine, the tradeoffs are worth it. But not for a desktop. With optical thunderbolt cables, you can keep the computer in a separate room, if fan noise and cooling are problems.

Can you use two cables to double your bandwidth on your eGPU? Some boxes come with two ports.

What’s most upsetting about this is that the M1’s GPU really isn’t great. I don’t know why so many tech KZfaqrs gloss over this. I’m worried that even the 16” won’t have a GPU that can compete with RTX 30 and RDNA 2 laptops.

Can you do some video on MacBook m1 being bricked ? Many are getting their m1 stop working and Apple won’t fix it Some are saying this is due to alternative dongle

I would assume that maybe in the future Thunderbolt ports would evolve to have multi-channel support under the same interface like PCI-e has multi-lanes 4x, 8x, etc But by then maybe the Apple GPUs would be so much faster that trying to make an external version of it even with something like TB3-4x wouldn’t still be enough to match it... OR maybe with Apple designed GPU cores they could have something up their sleeves were more GPU-cores can be efficiently added externally for tasks that don’t need too much back and forth data transfer to the main computer. /random thoughts over

I understand that eventually SOC’s will have enough juice to allow gaming with high settings on a laptop.....but for Apple to cut support seems a bit harsh. They even teamed up with Black Magic to make a very over priced non-upgradable eGPU which suits the MacBook line. So to cut support for them straight off the bat is a bit of a dick move. I don’t necessarily agree with the latency issue when it comes to M1, the base model M1’s cannot be used for gaming with any kinda hi res or decent settings, sure it’s impressive but an M1 Mac with and eGPU would: So much emphasis on video and music editing when I know it’s crazy but some people want and every day machine that they can also game on and like the Apple brand.

I think why Apple Silicon doesn’t support eGPU is these GPUs can only work on x86-based CPU (like Intel), not ARM-based chips.

Thanks! This info helped me make a purchase decision

Thought this was gonna be a clickbait, but was a great informative video - cheers!

I have macbook pro 16. I want to play windows games with best graphics and performance on windows bootcamp. Kindly suggest me which egpu will be best for the task

Awesome and informative video...

I may choose another way to build up a similar environment rather than undermining the edge over a sleek look.

.. They didn't drop eGPU Support dude. The M1 Mac's are first gen. The eGPU's are supported by Thunderbolt on the M1 Macs. The issue is drivers, there are no ARM Drivers for OSX.

I wish I knew what you were going on about, I just have a 13 inch 2012 MacBook Pro, and have taking up Blender which I am pretty good at. But the Render Engine in Cycles shows I don't have GPU Compute. How can I get this?

Only want LPDDR5 on 2023 Apple Silicon

You should also compare the performance with the thunderbolt 4 with new intel cpu since it has a separate controller for thunderbolt.

So it looks I'll be sticking with my 2020 13 inch Intel MacBook. It's the only one that can run x86 Windows via bootcamp and connect to my eGPU.

Hello. Can you please tell me, I watched a lot of videos and forums and didn't find anything. Who can tell you about the Macbook Air M1 8gb 256 \ 512 ssd for FIGMA? For ui \ ux. thank

the latency issued could be solved by having 2 thunderbolt cables as you have at least 2 thunderbolt ports on the Macbook. Internal GPU is the way to go, still can't beat PCI.

Question was mackbook pro 2018 + Egpu better than 2021 mackbook Air M1

There is still a point of eGPUs. When you have 4 different computers with good old Intel graphics and Thunderbolt port. You can share the GPU power between these by just connecting them to it. I bought a used Razer Core 2 for that use case and I can say it works pretty seamlessly. It’s true that M1 Macs, and especially M1X and next generations will certainly limit the eGPU market as we know it, unless these things happen : - A step forward in connectivity, TB4 won’t be that but maybe TB5 or an evolution of USB type C protocols - A step forward in PCI norm or equivalent internal connectivity tech - A revolution in GPUs, as M1X may already be close to the high end of the dedicated GPU market Maybe all of these will come from Apple anyway. The integrated/SoC type of architecture allows them to bypass PCI and other technologies which still rely on Intel. But if they want to make an ARM Mac Pro, they’ll have to build their own internal connectivity tech I guess.

And I just bought a eGPU for my 2020 13" MBP lol!

Sounds great. From this video I am concluding, that with my old Mac book pro from 2018 (Intel) I can leverage NVIDIA as an eGPU, right?

I think eGPUs on Macs are not dead. The initial eGPU support on Macs showed that there is a lot of potential but there is also a lot of room for improvements. I believe that Apple did no more than running a public beta test on the capabilities of eGPU. They learned a lot from the feedback coming from the market and communities. Learning 1: Thunderbolt 3 is not fast and robust enough. Learning 2: eGPUs bring gaming PC performance to Macs while handling heat and power consumption externally. Conclusion: With the gained experience, Apple can offer their own ARM based eGPUs for even higher performance. This won't be available anymore for TB3. Apple would leverage TB4 only to reduce the bottleneck (requires new Mac mini, new Mac Pro, new Mac Book Pro).

The eGPU is useful when your internal GPU is corrupted. eGPU has better heat dissipations that prolong your laptop's fans lifespan.

EGPUs are still good for older laptops, but pricing needs to be much lower to make upgrading a better option than just buying a whole new system. Then of course you have your arguments regarding planned obsolesce and overflowing land files with more than capable hardware.

don't the egpu makers just have to come up with updated drivers for apple silicon? it's up to them to support it.

Just as well. You can't even buy the latest graphics cards anyway to install into a eGPU.

eGPUs may be on their way out, but dedicated, high-end graphics cards aren't going anywhere. Even Apple will continue to use them in their high end Mac Pros. I currently depend on an eGPU to drive my Apple Pro Display HDR from my iMac Pro.

imagine, apple making their own gpus, with raytracing, and whatever other tech they throw into it

Well explained! 😊

so will it still work for gaming?

New Framework laptop works great with eGPU as it's Thunderbolt 4! And you can repair/upgrade it yourself. M1 chips are going to get expensive due to yields. Why do you think AMD went chiplets? Also, the memory is on the package so is very limited.