Using NVidia graphics cards with blender.

General Forums Off-topic Chat
1

I’ve heard with addition of MacOS High Sierra that you can use external graphics cards through the thunderbolt 3 ports. I am currently on a 13-inch, 2016 MacBook Pro if that helps. I was thinking of getting a GTX 1060 Graphics Card and hook it up to my computer, but I don’t know if Blender would even recognize the card. I make so many animations in Blender, especially ones with hair, and I want to speed that up. It’s taking almost two hours to make an 8 second animation. Will it work? Is there other ways to speed it up? Will it make much of a difference?

2

This gives you some actual information: http://forum.netkas.org/index.php?PHPSESSID=g32en7095kffdr1bei9sn2m7tqk07g0n&board=8.0

Also: http://barefeats.com/

TL;DR: Not fully ready for primetime, Only amd 480/580 on macOS atm. ( Apple dev kit ) Seems to even break NVidia drivers. Using other OS on the machine might be working. Should work in the future officially.

Jens

3

Thanks, I’ll take a look. I’ll also consider getting a 1070 instead of a 1060 GPU, because it isn’t listed in the testings.

4

Also, will Blender recognize it?

5

Seems so, see blender result: http://barefeats.com/imac17egpu.html

You could mail to rob-Art to get more info perhaps.

Jens

6

Definitely will be stretching my card a little this Christmas. But whatever, you get what you pay for.