Apple Partnered With Blackmagic On An External GPU For MacBooks (techcrunch.com)

Apple has worked with cinema company Blackmagic on an external GPU based around an AMD Radeon Pro 580 graphics card with 8GB of DDR5 RAM. The Blackmagic eGPU features "an HDMI port, four USB 3.1s and three Thunderbolt 3s, the latter of which makes it unique among these peripherals," reports TechCrunch. From the report: The company says the on-board cooling system operates pretty quietly, which should fit nicely alongside those new, quieter MacBook keyboards. Many developers will no doubt prefer to configure their own, but for those who want an easier solution for playing resource-intensive games or graphics rendering on with a MacBook, this is a fairly simple solution. The [$699] eGPU is available now through Apple's retail channels.

Comments

Why would you try to game on a Mac?

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

Why would you try to game on a Mac?

Serious question. I do a lot of dev on a Mac but my personal gaming rig is still a PC with a high-end internal video card (in a separate room to cut down fan noise, etc.).

Re:Why would you try to game on a Mac?

[omnichad]

Blackmagic makes hardware for video editing. I guess Apple is trying to keep FCP X relevant even while they hobble their actual hardware. This seems to be proof that the Mac Pro really is going to get killed off in favor of a laptop/all-in-one with an eGPU.

Re:Why would you try to game on a Mac?

[AmazingRuss]

Because my work is done on a mac, so I have a macbook. It dual boots windows, and has a GTX 1080 in an EGPU. Works great for regular games and VR. It's a nice looking setup too. Only one wire into the macbook.

Re:Why would you try to game on a Mac?

[Joce640k]

Serious question. I do a lot of dev on a Mac but my personal gaming rig is still a PC with a high-end internal video card (in a separate room to cut down fan noise, etc.).

Other more basic question: If you're going to buy that thing then then why not buy a console instead? For less money.

Bonus: You'll have a much wider selection of games to play, too.

Re:Why would you try to game on a Mac?

[AHuxley]

So the creative music and graphics people can get a feel for parts of the new game as its getting made on their own Macs.
When all ready the resulting game will be great on Windows 10 with any good consumer GPU.

Re:Why would you try to game on a Mac?

[DontBeAMoran]

Because fuck gamepads, that's why.

Re:Why would you try to game on a Mac?

[TheFakeTimCook]

Blackmagic makes hardware for video editing. I guess Apple is trying to keep FCP X relevant even while they hobble their actual hardware. This seems to be proof that the Mac Pro really is going to get killed off in favor of a laptop/all-in-one with an eGPU.

Or that eGPU is part of the "Modular" approach for the new Mac Pro hinted-at by Uncle Craig.

Re: Why would you try to game on a Mac?

[TheFakeTimCook]

turn off 'smart' punctuation on your iThing, it doesn't make you seem any smarter.

But it does show-off the fact that Slashdot's web-coders are dumber.

Re:Why would you try to game on a Mac?

[TheFakeTimCook]

Because my work is done on a mac, so I have a macbook. It dual boots windows, and has a GTX 1080 in an EGPU. Works great for regular games and VR. It's a nice looking setup too. Only one wire into the macbook.

There you go!

You're truly embracing the future of Macdom!!!

Re: Why would you try to game on a Mac?

[aliquis]

Only one wire into the macbook.

Funny how mac guys clearly brags the one expansion/accessories port they have is totally useless now.

It's like "You shouldn't game on a Mac anyway!" all over again.

Re:Why would you try to game on a Mac?

[tlhIngan]

Blackmagic makes hardware for video editing. I guess Apple is trying to keep FCP X relevant even while they hobble their actual hardware. This seems to be proof that the Mac Pro really is going to get killed off in favor of a laptop/all-in-one with an eGPU.

The Mac Pro (along with the Mac Mini) are the worst selling Macs in the entire lineup. And not because they are completely outdated, either - even when they were released they have historically been bad sellers. People just didn't want them. Even when they moved to Intel they weren't big sellers either.

I don't think sales of either are even a sizable fraction of a million units.

The only reason they're still around is Tim Cook hates discontinuing stuff that still can make a sale "for free" (i.e., requires no R&D work and they can still make 'em), and there's a tiny vocal population who keeps shouting they buy them.

For everyone else, well, if you have a MacBook, an eGPU can make a lot of sense - you take your laptop around to the shoots, and then dock it at home to the eGPU and do your editing there. You're not hauling around a heavy laptop made heavier with a external GPU you hardly use with a battery enlarged to support it, but at home it doesn't matter so you can have an external GPU to provide the acceleration you need.

Re:Why would you try to game on a Mac?

[omnichad]

you take your laptop around to the shoots, and then dock it at home to the eGPU and do your editing there

Hollywood still uses FCP - not talking about hobbyists. And they have Fibre Channel RAID arrays for storage. Huge control surfaces for editing. You don't pick up and move around that workstation.

Re:Why would you try to game on a Mac?

[605dave]

I actually am excited for this tech because I play around with 3D modeling and animation. Many renderers are available only for Nvidia solutions, which are now going to able to support the Mac. Additional video cards could come in handy for video as well as scientific tasks as well. Gaming is just a side benefit for me.

Re:Why would you try to game on a Mac?

[Anonymous Coward]

I see more Avid in the actual industry than FCPX, but FCP was the darling of all the indies.. There was a brief exodus to Premiere after the X launch debacle, but most (and many more) have returned as FCPX has returned to basic feature parity. I'm a Premiere user, but making the switch to FCPX once I finally make the jump to Mac, mostly because of the subscription. I used to be all gung ho about subscription (always have the latest version/features, big suite to use), but realized I haven't made a film in over a year and basically paid all that money for nothing; and I still have to go back and learn the new features once I finally start shooting my next one (real soon now, I hope). Anyway, FCPX (finally) has all the features I got with Premiere.

Dont' sleep on blackmagic, though, davinci is becoming a little editing beast in its own right.

Re:Why would you try to game on a Mac?

[Khyber]

"Only one wire into the macbook."

And how many going into or leaving the eGPU? Last I checked, you needed an external monitor for Mac eGPU usage if you wanted any actual decent performance. Oh, so let's add how many additional cords going to-from said monitor?

One cable, hah!

Re:Why would you try to game on a Mac?

[mikael]

They ran a cloud computing demo some time ago where a video artist could do some editing on one frame, press a button to apply to all frames, and then the cloud server would do that in real time allowing the video to be streamed straight back to the Apply PC. Having one of these would let someone run a personal cloud server.

Re:Why would you try to game on a Mac?

[omnichad]

Oh, sure - Avid was entrenched long before Apple released anything. I'm an FCP 7 user myself, but I haven't touched it often enough to ever want to upgrade. Keeping a Hackintosh around on Sierra because it's broken in later OS releases.

Re:Why would you try to game on a Mac?

[MachineShedFred]

OS X for work, Windows dual-boot for play.

Windows laptop cannot (legally) do the first bit.

Re: Why would you try to game on a Mac?

[MachineShedFred]

I don't even know what you tried to say.

MacBook Pro has always had more than one USB-C port. Plugging this in would take one. You still have more. And the first person that said anything remotely close to "you shouldn't game on a Mac" is you. There was one other guy talking about how there are no games on Mac, which is false, and completely forgets about the ability to install Windows as a dual-boot OS anyway.

Stop building straw men and knocking the hell out of them.
.

Re:Why would you try to game on a Mac?

[MachineShedFred]

So your argument is that this is a useless product because you would have to plug a single DisplayPort cable into it from a display, and never do anything else with it?

Really? That sounds like a fucking useability shit show. Oh my god. You have to plug a display into it. THE HORROR.

Never mind that if you wanted to use that display with literally any laptop ever, you would have to either plug it into a docking station, and plug the docking station into the laptop (exactly the same as this), or plug it into the laptop every single time you move the laptop, as well as all other cables. (worse than this).

What are you complaining about again?

Re:Why would you try to game on a Mac?

[MachineShedFred]

GPUs are used for more than games. This shouldn't come as news to a 6-digit ID around here.

Re: Why would you try to game on a Mac?

[aliquis]

I wanted to say that macs only had USB-C ports nowadays and since the world haven't really switched beyond for the charging and data port on phones and tablets I could understand how they were all unused :D ... well, except for adapters which let you hook up your gear ;D

It was just a joke about the one cable and USB type C ports only.

Then again a bunch of motherboards have front USB 3.1 gen 2 / type C headers on the board but very few PC cases actually have them so .. You kinda get 1 on the motherboard there instead. And usually you can totally forget about ThunderBolt unless you buy an addon card.

Lots of people excused the sad state of mac gaming, support and hardware with the claim that one shouldn't play games on one anyway. Kinda defending / believing religiously in moment 22. I guess I shouldn't said "I have never said it" because maybe I have at some time suggested a PC. Though it may very well be that I've never said that stupid thing. Definitely not as a defense of macs.

Nowadays there's many thousands of games even for Linux and OS X isn't worse of. But back in early 2000 and such the situation was horrible. But even worse for Linux.

I haven't built and straw men. The Macs use type C and few things except the phone chargers do and lots of people have said macs shouldn't be used for gaming. You just never understood what I was saying something you admitted in the very first sentence of your reply.

Re:Why would you try to game on a Mac?

[Khyber]

You obviously aren't FUCKING READING you brain-damaged fucktard.

YOU CAN *NOT* GET ****PERFORMANCE**** WITHOUT AN EXTERNAL MONITOR ATTRACHED. LOOPBACK VIA THUNDERBOLT DEGRADES PERFORMANCE.

You RETARD. Learn how to read and comprehend you fucking middle-school failure.

Re: Why would you try to game on a Mac?

[MachineShedFred]

You would be surprised. I'm typing this on a Dell XPS 15 that has two USB-C / Thunderbolt 3 ports, which I use to plug in a Thunderbolt dock that keeps two displays, keyboard, mouse attached. One cable when I walk into my home office, everything fires up. Works with Linux too, as long as you can get past the abomination that is X.org support for HiDPI displays.

Apple did fuck up when they decided that nobody needed any of the perfectly fine legacy ports though, which would still fit (USB-A, HDMI, Mini DisplayPort) - if either Linux or Windows power management was anywhere as good as Apple's, and the trackpad wasn't absolute garbage, this thing would be a better MacBook Pro than the actual MacBook Pro.

Re:Why would you try to game on a Mac?

[PopeRatzo]

You obviously aren't FUCKING READING you brain-damaged fucktard.

Jesus man, take it easy. You're going to give yourself a stroke.

You RETARD. Learn how to read and comprehend you fucking middle-school failure.

Look, go outside. Take a minute to reflect on whether it's really worth it to get that worked up over a guy's comment on Slashdot. When you're done with that, I'll buy you a beer and we can enjoy the rest of the day.

Too little too late

[volodymyrbiryuk]

for playing resource-intensive games or graphics rendering on with a MacBook, this is a fairly simple solution

The simple solution is to just use cloud based GPUs.

Re:Too little too late

[alvinrod]

I don't think there are too many people who would buy this for gaming. For the $700 price on this thing, you could almost build your own gaming PC with comparable specs. I'd say that this mainly looks to be for people who do video production and want to be able to have additional performance when at their desk. They just tack on the extra bit about gaming in the hopes that people assign more value to the product even though it's not something that they'll really use it for. The number of people who would buy this just for gaming could probably be counted on one hand.

The latest Playstation and Xbox consoles have GPUs that are pretty similar to a Radeon 580, so if you wanted the cheapest option, you'd just buy a console assuming you're not bothered by a lack of PC-only titles, which since we're talking about gaming on a Mac is clearly not the case.

Re:Too little too late

[DigiShaman]

So then what's the point of buying a high-end computer? Just a cheap-ass Intel NUC, or even a refurbished HP desktop, then remote terminal int your cloud-based desktop virtual session.

Have no idea of the cost/benefit analysis between local hardware and cloud services, but one of the issues might be locality of the data, and size of files. That will either increase cloud storage costs, or increase time to upload/download data to work on projects.

Why Not?

[SuperKendall]

Why would you not?

Some Macs (iMac Pro) have powerful video cards now. And having one computer beats having to own and maintain two...

Beyond that, I was scarred for life trying to keep a gaming PC running Windows operational for many years. A possible slight drop in performance is worth it for my sanity.

Re:Why Not?

[SuperKendall]

a) There's no Mac games available that would require that thing, and

There are quite a few. For the few that are not on the Mac, you can at least use Bootcamp if you are desperate - you are still configuring Windows, but at least you are not dealing with flaky barely compatible hardware.

Also Wine/Steam may be a possibility, have not tried as I've not needed to...

b) No company is going to develop them because not enough people will ever own one of those to make it worthwhile.

Since most of them are you seem plainly wrong on that one. Ever heard of a little game called "Fortnite??"

Gotchya.

Re: Why Not?

[DontBeAMoran]

Many games, yes. Anywhere near as many as on Windows, absolutely not.

Re: Why Not?

[TheFakeTimCook]

Many games, yes. Anywhere near as many as on Windows, absolutely not.

There are more Ford Focuses than Bugattis.

So what?

Re: Why Not?

[aliquis]

Your car analogy is wrong since PCs doesn't only get "Fords" and macs "Bugattis."

It would be more like a museum or seller which only have some of the inventory.

Re: Why Not?

[aliquis]

Have you actually used PC? (As far as compatibility goes.)

Ad for what to use getting an Apple laptop is like twice the Dell cost and this external GPU is like twice the graphics card cost too.

Re: Why Not?

[SuperKendall]

Have you actually used PC? (As far as compatibility goes.)

I used them for many years which is why I do not any longer.

Ad for what to use getting an Apple laptop is like twice the Dell cost

I am happy to buy laptops for 1.5x the price that last 5x as long, are better built, and require less fuckery with the OS. My 17" MacBook Pro from 2010 is still in heavy daily use for example (and still can run the latest OS). Because the case is solid it still looks fantastic, except of course for a scuff in the corner where I dropped it 3 feet onto concrete without other damage... so why on earth would I buy a cheap-ass Dell that probably will not last as long as my toilet paper roll, or feel as nice?

With eGPU support you could even realistically use a laptop for gaming for quite some time which is pretty nice.

Re: Why Not?

[TheFakeTimCook]

Your car analogy is wrong since PCs doesn't only get "Fords" and macs "Bugattis."

It would be more like a museum or seller which only have some of the inventory.

I've admittedly never been good at analogies; don't know why, exactly.

But you obviously got the underlying idea. ;-)

Re: Why Not?

[MachineShedFred]

Did this malware destroy your ability to use punctuation? Or coherent thought?

Re:Why Not?

[MachineShedFred]

You know it would be a single plug, right? The keyboard and mouse would stay plugged into the eGPU. It would look amazingly like the following:

1. put laptop on desk
2. plug in Thunderbolt-3 USB-C connector
3. display(s) turn on and you start using keyboard and mouse that were already plugged in to the USB on the eGPU.

This is exactly how my Thunderbolt-3 dock works with my Dell XPS. Why would it be any different on OS X, except without all the stupid Windows sounds trampling each other for each device detected all at once? Oh, but I'm sure that plugging in that one wire would take you longer than all the time wasted by Windows Update over the last few years.

Re: Why Not?

[aliquis]

My Macbook Pro did cost at-least 50% more than a Dell and came with half the VRAM and a lower resolution screen.
It kinda worked for a year but even though the 8600m GT was capable of decoding H.264 video Apple wasn't or whatever and when they had fixed support for Flash for it they only did so for the 9600m GT and as such it ran like 70 degrees all the time and the battery wore out very quickly so it wasn't all that useful then. I used it in the home and with connected power cord and moved it around and as such after one year or little above the magsafe connector cable was so worn that it made very bad connection and that together with the poor state of the battery meant that the cable might had lost connection at any time and the laptop didn't go to sleep at low power it just died so the computer died pretty regularly kinda like my very shitty Galaxy S5 do now but not that bad.

Anyway I broke my foot and jumped around with it and it had the cable tangled somewhat so I pulled it to bring it with me and that opened up the isolation of the cable / the cable become damaged and I hadn't ordered a new charger because I thought it was kinda shit and supposedly Apple would replace them because they WERE shit but now I had broken the outside isolation of the cable which made that harder.

I waited a long time actually doing something because the warranty on manufacturing faults here is three years but maybe the no questions ask so to say warranty was dropped from 12 to 6 months I don't even know the laws as is. Anyway some time I had get a mosaic pattern on it and for whatever reason there was like a brighter spot on the screen as well so I kinda wanted to bring that up but felt uncomfortable for whatever reason / waited and I did so late and was very stressed and angry when calling Apple support and not at all polite. Anyway brought it to a store which was a service partner but it kinda just had passed three years then and he claimed the left IO board was broken because supposedly it didn't took charge through the magsafe charger but worked with a charged battery, he also claimed the power button "was failing" and wanted 5000 SEK for replacing the upper part of the computer and the left IO card. Something I didn't do because the left IO cards was only $100 on ebay and I figured I could do it myself.

So I never fixed it and got just over a years life of it and I'm not impressive with that piece of shit. The Dell would had been more capable for much less. Sure the problems wasn't all that bad and could had been fixed.

The keyboard was very nasty to use, the screen was TN and if I remember correctly the audio output was pretty shitty too?
They also used those dumb 2.5 or 3.5 mm optical plugs for audio which broke so fucking easy.

I wonder what "5x as long" really mean. Do you use a laptop for 10-15 years? I have no "fuckery" with Windows 10. Sure before getting it I ran an OS X hack and before that a bit of Solaris and before that BSDs and Linux and yeah, OS X is nicer than Solaris on x86 I grant you that..

I don't know how long the Dell would last. Guess after four years you could had bought another one for the saved money.

Since mine didn't last as long my experience isn't the same. Cost twice of a desktop PC and lasted 1/10 as long? :D

Maybe saying the power cable for the desktop PC doesn't break isn't fare because you also unlikely bring it to the shitter. Then again there's tablets or phones for that by now. On the other hand a desktop PC doesn't boil your testicles either. All feminists must perish.

Re: Why Not?

[aliquis]

The accurate one is "OS X get a fair share of both AAA and indie games, it's enough to keep you occupied but of course not enough if the game you want isn't available for OS X."

Kinda.

For the casual gamer who are willing to just get to play anything it likely work.

For the person who are serious about a game / category where that game doesn't exist or you'd get much less titles to choose from .. maybe not so much.

Then again I guess we could argue how much time people have to playing all the games anyway.

I have thousands of games but I've played like .. 10-15? =P

Extenal Only?

[gizmo2199]

So is this for external monitors only, I assume? It's not like you could just plug a thunderbolt cable to your Macbook and have the graphics capability on the laptop display.

Re:Extenal Only?

[Joce640k]

Yep.

Re:Extenal Only?

[gizmo2199]

"For best results with applications like 3D games, set a display that's attached to the eGPU as the primary system display"
https://support.apple.com/en-u...

Figured. But you wouldn't need an external monitor for GPU-accelerated applications, like photoshop or final cut.

Re:Extenal Only?

[kelarius]

I don't know specifically about the linked eGPU but it is possible to use other eGPUs on the internal display. The trade off is that it's a pain in the ass to set up and you do lose a little bit of graphics power as you're sending video data back across the same Thunderbolt 3 link.

Re:Extenal Only?

[TheFakeTimCook]

"For best results with applications like 3D games, set a display that's attached to the eGPU as the primary system display"
https://support.apple.com/en-u...

Figured. But you wouldn't need an external monitor for GPU-accelerated applications, like photoshop or final cut.

From what I understand, it will "loop back" video to the Mac's internal display, as well.

Re:Extenal Only?

[MachineShedFred]

You could, if there was some tricky drivers built for it. This is essentially how Nvidia Optimus works in equipped notebooks - the discrete GPU is only used for frame rendering, and the frame is handed off to the Intel GPU that draws it to the display. I'm sure they have patented the living balls out of it and wouldn't hesitate to fire off many lawsuits at Apple if they tried to recreate it using AMD GPUs, but it could be technically possible.

Different Companies, Same $$$

[cre1mer]

Blackmagic also charges high prices for their gear as Apple does. Need an HDMI to USB3 capture device? Blackmagic is $300. Any generic company is $50.

Instead of making macbooks a few mm thicker

[xack]

They now require a giant box on the side. I still repeat my suggestion for a fat macbook.

Re:Instead of making macbooks a few mm thicker

[MachineShedFred]

Yeah, because thunderbolt attached external GPUs are brand new, and this is the first one on the market. No wait, they've been around for years, practically since Thunderbolt existed.

What will they invent next??

[rogoshen1]

Cool another innovation for Apple!

First they invent the mp3 player
then the smart phone
then an app store
then the tablet
and now external GPU's??

Real men of genius indeed.

Re:What will they invent next??

[fibonacci8]

Any sufficiently advanced sarcasm is indistinguishable from lying.

Apple didn't invent any of the things on your list, but they did market them as "innovations".

Re:What will they invent next??

[AHuxley]

Its like the days of the Radio Shack Expansion Interface for the Radio Shack TRS80.
A new box next to the new computer to do more computer things with.

Re:What will they invent next??

[EnsilZah]

It takes courage not to bother putting a GPU in your unupgradable computer.

Next step is obviously making it wireless.
You haven't lived until you've had 40Gbps piped through the air near your head an nether region.

GDDR5 != DDR5

[Anonymous Coward]

GDDR5 != DDR5

Blackmagic Invenets their own Graphics Amplifier!

[pecosdave]

It's pretty cool and all, but not really new.

https://www.dell.com/en-us/sho...

I've actually played with external PCIexpress boxes that connect to Thunderbolt 2 you can put graphics cards in - granted not to this same performance level.

It's for VR Development

[Proudrooster]

Apple is really lagging as a VR development platform which needs a substantial video card. This EGPU will allow Apple to finally get into the VR development world. You can't get the following specs in a skinny laptop with a sad little fan and butterfly keyboard:

Newegg Recommended VR PC Specs:

i5-6500 or Greater CPU
NVIDIA GTX 980 or AMD R9 390 GPU or greater
16GB+ RAM
SSD (PCIe NVMe recommended)
Check out our Newegg approved VR systems

Official Oculus Rift Recommended Specs:

Intel i5-4590 equivalent or greater
NVIDIA GTX 970 or AMD R9 290 or greater
8GB RAM or more
HDMI 1.3 and 3x USB 3.0 plus 1x USB 2.0

Re:Slow bus

[thegreatbob]

USB in its current form cannot be used efficiently for this. There is no provision for DMA between the connected devices and the host system, among other issues. Also, the PCIe 3.0 x4 of a thunderbolt 3 port should yield something like 40gbit/s transfers, which is faster than any USB specification (implemented or not) to date.

maybe if they had ext-pci-e at least X8 not TB

[Joe_Dragon]

maybe if they had ext-pci-e at least X8 not TB.

now if the new mac pro goes down this route at least have 6-8 TB 3.0 buses.

Mine showed up today

[zurmikopa]

I previously tried the eGPU developer kit, but rarely used it since it wouldn't connect to my 5K monitor and was noisy.

I wanted something I could leave connected all the time and still have my MBP just connect up to everything with 1 cable.

I'm pretty happy with it, it made my MBP much faster for 3d, it works with my 5K monitor and it's very quiet. If anything, it actually makes my overall setup a little quieter since the mac's fans no longer spin up due to the 5K monitor load.

I have a PC I use for VR which is still faster, but for 95% of what I want to do, this is great, and it avoids me needing to touch Windows most of the time.

Re:Slow bus

[MachineShedFred]

Because USB is CPU bound, where Thunderbolt is essentially PCI express?

Only two thunderbolt 3 ports

[chaugen]

Not sure what led Techcrunch to report otherwise, but there are only two Thunderbolt ports... one of which is used to connect to the host Mac, so it merely allows you to daisy chain other Thunderbolt devices.