External Graphics Cards for Mac Gaming
Vr chat for mac. In layman’s terms, Apple officially supports some graphics cards that you’d normally only find in a bulky PC tower—so long as you have a separate external chassis to stick them in and a Mac. An eGPU or External GPU is essentially a piece of hardware enclosure in which a desktop graphics card can be mounted to be used with your laptops for powering up applications and games. Desktop GPUs are far more powerful than integrated mobile GPUs or APUs and offer up to 10x performance improvements over them.While eGPUs have been around for years now, their functionality has been greatly. The Thunderbolt eGFX box is an expansion chassis designed to house an NVIDIA or AMD graphics card. Connected to the Mac or PC laptop via Thunderbolt port, the additional GPU power instantly upgrades an integrated laptop's GPU.
External Graphics Cards for Mac Gaming 9 years, 3 months ago
I was looking up external graphics cards that would work with Mac, because you can't replace the card on the Mac Mini and all of my other system specs are good enough for gaming, and I was wondering if there were any that I could hook up to my Mac Mini that would help me run current PC games, such as StarCraft 2. I have seen some that seemed like they would probably work, but I want to get a second opinion before I shell out the money for one. Your help would greatly be appreciated. |
Re:External Graphics Cards for Mac Gaming 9 years, 3 months ago
jack59splat59 wrote: I was looking up external graphics cards that would work with Mac, because you can't replace the card on the Mac Mini and all of my other system specs are good enough for gaming, and I was wondering if there were any that I could hook up to my Mac Mini that would help me run current PC games, such as StarCraft 2. I have seen some that seemed like they would probably work, but I want to get a second opinion before I shell out the money for one. Your help would greatly be appreciated. All I can say is good luck with that. Your issues will be bandwidth (USB or Firewire won't cut it) and Mac drivers (which most likely won't exist). You're better off buying a cheap PC rig for gaming, tbh. |
Re:External Graphics Cards for Mac Gaming 9 years, 3 months ago
vitaflo wrote: You're better off buying a cheap PC rig for gaming, tbh. I guess so. I think the problem is that it's a very specific need and I don't think a lot of people need an external drive for mac gaming. |
Re:External Graphics Cards for Mac Gaming 9 years, 3 months ago
Well, they do exist even for Mac www.gefen.com/kvm/dproduct.jsp?prod_id=8863 However, they will not do what you want to. They aren't meant for gaming, but rather are for display only. I would imagine even video looks horrendous on these things. |
Re:External Graphics Cards for Mac Gaming 9 years, 3 months ago
![Cards Cards](/uploads/1/3/4/3/134324095/230612102.jpg)
I'm not sure how it'd look horrendous. It's video. It'd not be accelerated in any way shape or form likely, but other than that, it should give clear, crisp video. And OpenGL does have software modes for times when it's needed for anti-aliasing and such, though that's very CPU intensive, what with having no GPU in the device and whatnot. |
Re:External Graphics Cards for Mac Gaming 9 years, 3 months ago
USB2 theoretically has a data rate of 480Mbps 1280 x 1024 resolution at 32 bit color is about 42Mb. That a max of about 11 frames per second if there were NO other devices to share with and no collisions. (I picked 1280 x 1024 as its the standard LCD resolution of monitors that most people have now) Now even more realistically, USB2 actually transfers at about 320Mbps. This leads to about 8.5 frames per second. 8.5 frames a second is fine when dealing with Text, graphics, etc. But once you put motion into it, you WILL notice it and it will be unwatchable. Oh yah, and USB requires the CPU to do its processing. So the computer will be controlling the USB transfer and decoding the video, potentially dropping the frame rate even lower. |
Re:External Graphics Cards for Mac Gaming 9 years, 3 months ago
Like everyone else has said, you can't have an external graphics card for gaming. Your best bet is to buy a POS PC for 300-400$ if you want to play games. If you insist on getting a mac, a refurbished MacBook with a decent card is only about 800$ will run SC2 fine. |
Re:External Graphics Cards for Mac Gaming 9 years, 3 months ago
Gotta agree here I built a POS box about 2 years ago and it runs SC2 just fine. |
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Mac shortcut for copyright symbol. External GPUs are in the news lately, what with NVIDIA's announcement offering macOS drivers for its Titan Xp and Apple offering an eGPU Developer Kit for High Sierra, so we thought we'd take a second to explain what, exactly, an external GPU is — and how you'd go about getting one.
External GPUs: Supercharging gaming and video production
All Macs have a CPU, which provides the primary processing power for your computer. But in addition, they have a GPU — a graphics processing unit — designed to drive your computer's screen, external displays, and visuals.
GPUs are what sell high-end Windows gaming laptops and desktops: They keep your favorite game flawless, your external display running smoothly, and visual effects rendering speedy. They're also very important in rendering VR experiences.
But all that power comes at the expense of battery and optimization: Heavy-duty GPUs are frequent power hogs with lots of fan noise and problematic battery life. As such, Apple has historically trended toward putting in GPUs that balanced power with optimization: great for your laptop's battery life; not so great for gamers, VR, or visual effects artists.
Enter external GPUs: Like external hard drives, these essentially allow you to stick a GPU in a Thunderbolt housing, where you can then connect it to your computer; from there, when you run games, VR, and visual apps optimized for that GPU you should see significant performance improvements. Awesome, right? Well, almost.
The cons of an external GPU on your Mac
Here's the issue: Macs won't officially support external GPUs until macOS High Sierra. That's not to say you can't use an external GPU on older operating systems — only that Apple Support won't bail you out if you do something that doesn't agree with your Mac. https://ybvrhf.weebly.com/seagate-external-hard-drive-for-mac.html. Proceed at your own risk, here be dragons, et cetera.
In addition, should you decide to use an external GPU, there are only a handful of Thunderbolt enclosures and graphics cards with appropriate Mac drivers — you can't just pick an arbitrary graphics card you'd like to attach to your Mac.
How to use an external GPU with your Mac
Thankfully, you don't have to venture into the void without guidance: The eGPU.io community has put together a huge array of helpful how-tos and setup guides for interested users — I'm looking forward to using their startup guide and forums to make a Thunderbolt 3 eGPU for my MacBook Pro.
Questions?
Other questions about external GPUs? Let us know below. Seatools for mac.
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