Now I know a lot of you guys don’t want to hear this.. But I am almost completely
sure that Apple Silicon Macs, including the current M1 Macs, will NEVER support eGPUs.
And to make it even worse.. I have a feeling that eGPUs in general are going to slowly
but surely die off as well..
But before I explain my theory and how this is going to eventually happen.. I wanna quickly
give those of you who don’t know what an eGPU is a brief rundown of the history of
eGPUs.
On October 27th of 2014, the Alienware 13 gaming laptop was revealed, and alongside
it came a graphics amplifier that would boost the gaming performance.
The only problem was that it used a proprietary connector, so it could only work with specific
Alienware laptops, and nothing else.
Thankfully, on June 1st, 2015, Intel unveiled Thunderbolt 3, the new high-speed standard
which took advantage of the USB-C port to enable super fast data transfer speeds.
And then in October, Dell unveiled their new XPS laptops, which were the very first computers
to come with a single Thunderbolt 3 port.
And then finally at CES 2016, Razer released their Core eGPU, which connected to their
Blade Stealth laptop or any other laptop with Thunderbolt 3, and it accepted basically any
graphics card out there.
This was a game changer because it also worked with Dell’s very first Thunderbolt-3 equipped
XPS laptops, which quickly grew in popularity.
And then we soon started seeing users sticking high-end graphics cards like the GTX 1080
into the Razer Core to greatly improve graphics performance on the Dell XPS laptops.
People quickly realized that this was the perfect solution if you wanted a thin and
light laptop for portability, but also wanted to do some gaming.
And then in October of 2016, Apple revealed the completely redesigned MacBook Pros, now
packing up to four Thunderbolt 3 ports, which makes it perfect for eGPUs.
Now this is where it started to get very interesting. At Apple’s 2017 WWDC event, they revealed
support for eGPUs, and they even created developer kits for testing, packed with an RX 580 graphics
card.
So of course, we had to get our hands on one, and that was way back when we used to work
for Appleinsider.
We ran a few tests and we quickly saw that eGPUs were going to be a HUGE deal for MacBooks,
giving us almost 3x more RAW graphics performance in Geekbench 4.
And then we ran a video editing test in Final Cut Pro, and the eGPU helped finish the BruceX
benchmark in half the time.
And in every video editing test we ran in Resolve, the eGPU boosted performance, even
though we were still using a beta version of macOS High Sierra.
Over the next couple of years, we made various eGPU videos, including gaming on Mac videos,
where we continued to see excellent performance gains.
At one point, we compared a fully loaded 15” MacBook Pro for $3,549 to the base $1300 MacBook
Pro 13” with a $700 eGPU setup and the results were amazing.
The eGPU greatly boosted performance in many different video editing tasks, and it absolutely
destroyed the 15” Pro in terms of gaming performance, so our conclusion was that it
made more sense to go with this 13” eGPU setup and save around $1500 since the eGPU
is upgradable, so you can keep it for the future.
But unfortunately.. When the 2019 15” MacBook Pro was released, we realized that eGPUs had
one major issue which would eventually lead to their demise.
Even though the eGPU allowed us to get crazy amounts of graphics power, over double the
performance of the dedicated Vega 20 graphics in the MacBook Pro, it actually SLOWED DOWN
real-world video editing performance.
Yes, that’s right, in everything from basic 4K h.264 exporting and HEVC codec footage
was drastically SLOWER with an eGPU compared to just having the MacBook Pro by itself.
And then for 4.5K Red RAW editing, the performance stayed basically the same, so if you chose
to buy an eGPU for your 15” Pro, you would literally be wasting money and potentially
slowing down performance.
And ever since then, we have only been recommending eGPUs for 13” MacBook Pros, especially when
the 5700 XT graphics card was released, which gave us massive amounts of raw graphics performance,
even beating out the $2600 16” MacBook Pro.
This was even more apparent for gaming performance, with the eGPU giving us over 50% more FPS
compared to that 16” MacBook Pro, so the base 13” MacBook Pro with the 5700 XT eGPU
was our recommended setup for gaming.
However, when it came to real-world video editing performance, we started to see the
same exact issues.
This time, the 16” by itself was faster in literally every single video editing test
that we ran, even though the raw graphics power was much lower, which at first, didn’t
make any sense at all.. And then we finally figured out what was causing this.
When you’re doing real-world work like video editing or anything else, data has to travel
back and forth between the CPU and the graphics, and the problem with eGPUs is that they are
connected using a single Thunderbolt 3 cable.
So essentially, the data has to travel through that cable into the eGPU and then back through
the same cable, and since there is a limited amount of data that the cable can support,
this essentially creates a bottleneck in the system.
The CPU is stuck waiting on the data from the eGPU to come back to it before it can
continue doing it’s work, so the added latency really slows the entire system down, and that’s
why it was possible to actually get much slower performance when adding an expensive eGPU.
And in the case of the 16” MacBook Pro, it’s able to perform great by itself even
though it has much lower raw graphics power because both the CPU and the dedicated graphics
are right next to each other on the Logic Board, connected by a high-bandwidth internal
connection instead of a cable with limited throughput.
And this is finally where Apple’s M1 Macs come in, which are the first Macs in years
to drop support for eGPUs, so let me explain why.
As we all know, Apple is eventually going to transition their entire Mac lineup over
to using their Apple Silicon chips, with the M1 chip being the first of its kind.
Apple’s number 1 priority for the M1 chip was to pack everything from the CPU, the graphics,
the RAM and everything else into a single chip.
And if you’re wondering why, it’s because this drastically reduces latency by having
everything literally right next to each other, so data doesn’t even have to travel through
the Logic Board at all. EVERYTHING that has ANYTHING to do with processing is on the SAME
chip.
And THAT is why Apple’s M1 Macs are so incredibly efficient at real-world performance tasks
like Logic Pro music production, Xcode Programming and video editing, where we’ve been getting
better performance than we expected out of this tiny M1 chip.
And that’s why I believe Apple dropped support for eGPUs on M1 Macs, since they would add
a massive amount of latency to the entire process by sending data through a Thunderbolt
3 cable, basically ruining the ONE THING that makes the M1 chip so good, which is low latency.
So just like we saw with the 15” MacBook Pro, I believe that an eGPU would have an
even worse effect on M1 Macs, and I think that Apple knew it, and that’s why they
dropped eGPU support.
And if we look further into the future, we know that Apple will transition all of their
Macs over to using Apple Silicon chips, which will all have the same focus of minimizing
latency to improve performance and efficiency, so because of that, I don’t think eGPU support
is ever coming back.
The added latency from data going through a cable will absolutely ruin real-world performance,
no matter how good of a graphics card you throw into an eGPU.
So that’s why eGPU support on Macs will soon be a thing of the past! But what about
eGPUs for Windows machines?
Well, with desktop PCs, you have the option of simply plugging your graphics card into
one of the PCI express slots, which gives you much faster performance, again due to
lower latency.
And as for Windows laptops, eGPUs haven’t really been that popular since there are so
many laptop manufacturers that are willing to make the laptop thick to get a high-performance
graphics card in there.
Apple wasn’t willing to do that since they want their MacBooks to be thin and light,
which is why eGPUs became so popular for Macs.
But on the Windows side, we now have a ton of gaming laptops with high-end dedicated
graphics that are powerful enough to not even have to consider using an eGPU.
And as chip technology gets more advanced, like with AMD’s latest super efficient RDNA2,
gaming laptops will be getting even better.
AMD even showed off 1440P gaming at 60 frames per second on an RNDA2-powered laptop which
should be coming within the next couple of months, no longer requiring an eGPU to get
great gaming performance.
So because of that, I think the market for eGPUs is shrinking, especially with Apple
dropping support on M1 Macs, killing off the number 1 market for eGPUs.
And I believe that very soon, eGPUs will eventually completely die out, because Windows laptops
won’t really need them anymore.
So there you guys have it, hopefully you learned something new from this video, and if you
totally disagree with me, go ahead and comment your thoughts down below. Definitely check
out one of those two videos, and click that circle above to subscribe. Thanks for watching,
and we’ll see you in the next one!