eGPU for Mac

Hello, as I know eGPU’s are soon to be officially supported on Macs and they actually already work. But not sure which to get for work in Blender. I have seen good results with nVidia cards, but as I understand AMD cards currently are more supported by Apple. Has someone used or tried Mac + eGPU + AMD card like RX Vega 56/64 in Blender? What card would you suggest to get for Mac + eGPU setup.

I’ll bump this up by writing what I have discovered.
As I understand AMD cards are not suitable for rendering in Cycles on Mac OS because of bad OpenCL drivers, which only Apple can fix.
Don’t know what to do - get nVidia card or wait till Apple do something with their OpenCL thing. As I understand AMD cards will be natively supported under Mac OS, that’s why I’m not sure if investing in nVidia card is best when after few months iMac Pro (which will have AMD Vega card) comes out and Apple probably will update drivers and hopefully also OpenCL support.

Maybe someone knows about OpenCL future on Mac OS and will AMD cards be ready for Cycles on Mac OS in near future?

Ok one more bump for my own thread. I found out that it’s something with Mac OS not letting to split kernel for OpenCL and it’s a problem that needs to be solved between Apple and AMD I guess. Until then AMD cards are useless on Mac for Cycles. Anyway I just hope someone on this forum who succesfully uses eGPU on Mac can answer how far is the AMD card support or better get nVidia card or even it’s not worth getting eGPU on Mac and the only solution is Windows or Linux.

I would wait until Apple officially supports eGPUs in a stable release (not beta) before making purchase decisions.

Info from Sonnet Tech expansion systems…

macOS High Sierra (10.13) currently offers only beta support for connection of external GPUs, and not all Thunderbolt Macs are currently supported with AMD beta GPU Thunderbolt drivers. For information regarding enabling the use of the eGFX Breakaway Puck with macOS, click here.

macOS High Sierra has only beta support for connection of GPU cards over Thunderbolt and GPU card drivers are not yet officially Thunderbolt compatible for macOS. For more information, see Sonnet Support Library.

“Basically, with Windows 10 you can.” (so they claim) :wink:

Yes you are right man! Anyway I ordered the eGPU enclosure, I have seen many guys using it for Octane, few with Blender and it looks like it’s working. If I’ll run into problems, will use windows (bootcamp), till Mac OS is finally ready for eGPU.

Another question which maybe needs another thread but anyway:
Maybe someone knows what is the close future plans regarding Mac OS + OpenCL rendering. As I understand OpenCL under Mac Os is not suitable for Cycles yet… Maybe someone knows how soon it could change. I have few weeks till my eGPU arrives, till that time I need to decide if I take AMD or nVidia card.

i bought a sonnet eGPU enclosure recently and an NVIDIA card. I have the setup working nicely in mac osSierra on a MBP 2016 touchbar with the latest Blender release.