Apple Silicon and eGPU, ever?

[DM_DM]

Hi

Can apple silicon work with an eGPU? Is there a hardware restriction?

Speculative:

Also, Will the new M1x or M2 devices with n graphic cores be able to play a buggy cyberpunk at 1440/60?

If not, could M3 or M4 devices in future do it?

Or will apple continue to be an apple and not care about AAA titles till they develop an nvidia/amd equivalent?

 

[Zdigital2015]

Hi

Can apple silicon work with an eGPU? Is there a hardware restriction?

Speculative:

Also, Will the new M1x or M2 devices with n graphic cores be able to play a buggy cyberpunk at 1440/60?

If not, could M3 or M4 devices in future do it?

Or will apple continue to be an apple and not care about AAA titles till they develop an nvidia/amd equivalent?

Apple is unlikely to spend time creating AS-based drivers for AMD GPUs and instead is going to concentrate on their own GPU silicon exclusively. I believe eGPUs are dead for good on the Apple Silicon side, as are "discrete" GPU options. All of Apple's future GPUs are going to depend on their unified memory architecture moving forward, even if the GPU is removed from the CPU die, which I don't think it will be.

Apple is not going to devote resources to gaming, any issues with Cyberpunk or any other AAA title will have to be sorted out by the game's developer.

 

[leman]

Hi

Can apple silicon work with an eGPU? Is there a hardware restriction?

No hardware restriction. But I doubt that we will ever see it. Third-party GPUs break Apples carefully designed GPU programming model and they want the devs to fully embrace the capabilities of Apple Silicon instead

Speculative:

Also, Will the new M1x or M2 devices with n graphic cores be able to play a buggy cyberpunk at 1440/60?

If CD Project decides to bring it an optimized port to the Mac even the M1 should be able to run it. But it’s not going to happen, they can’t even port it to consoles properly.

Or will apple continue to be an apple and not care about AAA titles till they develop an nvidia/amd equivalent?

Apple already has an NVIDIA/AMD equivalent if you are talking about performance. As to the other part of your question, I doubt that Apple will pay CD project to make a buggy port of a controversial game.

 

[xraydoc]

Or will apple continue to be an apple and not care about AAA titles till they develop an nvidia/amd equivalent?

It's more that game developers aren't interested in developing these titles for the Mac as it would be a very small return, if any, on the massive development investment required.

If you want to play games like that, just get a PC (or a console). I don't play games that often, but I bought a PC for when I do feel like playing.

 

[Andropov]

No hardware restriction. But I doubt that we will ever see it. Third-party GPUs break Apples carefully designed GPU programming model and they want the devs to fully embrace the capabilities of Apple Silicon instead

Maybe eGPUs could become available as compute nodes, but not usable for video output. It wouldn't need a lot of effort on Apple's part to implement, and doesn't mess with the proposed GPU programing model as much since the whole TBDR thing is used for rendering, not compute. Developers could opt-in and accelerate some compute tasks in their apps, explicitly knowing that eGPUs would have higher latency / don't automatically share memory with the system.

 

[hovscorpion12]

As far as eGPU’s I don’t believe Apple will ever support them on Apple Silicon devices. That would require Apple to create drivers that would work with eGPUs. Apple has stated that their M and A-series have the best GPUs.

If your interesting in playing Cyberpunk on MacOS, then i‘d suggest Nvidia GeForce Now or a cloud gaming platform. Macbooks have never been a gaming device, I don’t believe Apple will ever focus on making MacBooks for gaming.

The graphic processing for Macs are more geared to professional use, video/photo editing.

if it’s gaming your interested in, then i‘d suggest a Windows Laptops.

 

[leman]

Maybe eGPUs could become available as compute nodes, but not usable for video output. It wouldn't need a lot of effort on Apple's part to implement, and doesn't mess with the proposed GPU programing model as much since the whole TBDR thing is used for rendering, not compute. Developers could opt-in and accelerate some compute tasks in their apps, explicitly knowing that eGPUs would have higher latency / don't automatically share memory with the system.

They could do that, but I doubt they would. That would mean releasing a compute-only subset of Metal and introducing an entirely new driver substack for a fairly niche feature... They could also introduce a new type of DriverKit driver for high-performance PCIe devices which would allow third-party to write their custom drivers for macOS, but who would even bother. Besides, that would potentially open the way for Nvidia to offer CUDA on macOS again and Apple doesn't want that.

So yeah, I would not hold my breath. Not for technical but for political reasons.

If your interesting in playing Cyberpunk on MacOS, then i‘d suggest Nvidia GeForce Now or a cloud gaming platform. Macbooks have never been a gaming device, I don’t believe Apple will ever focus on making MacBooks for gaming.

The graphic processing for Macs are more geared to professional use, video/photo editing.

Apple Silicon GPUs are absolutely designed with gaming in mind are are quite adequate gaming devices compared to their size and energy usage. The gaming potential of the M1 Macs is 2-3 times higher than the Intel models they replace. The issue with gaming on Mac is the limited availability of games, not the GPU performance.

 

[senttoschool]

@leman do you ever think Apple will create their own eGPU solution based on their own Apple Silicon GPUs. IE. they might sell you a $3,000 128-core eGPU for your Macbook Pro?

 

[leman]

@leman do you ever think Apple will create their own eGPU solution based on their own Apple Silicon GPUs. IE. they might sell you a $3,000 128-core eGPU for your Macbook Pro?

I would be very surprised if they did. That eGPU won't be able to use unified memory, and it's performance will be severely limited by the narrow PCI-e interface. Also, that sounds like an incredibly niche market. Rather then selling you a $3000 GPU they'd just tell you to buy a $5000 Mac Pro and be done with it.

 

[quarkysg]

Existing Mac Pro can increase it's compute and graphics capabilities by adding additional MPX GPU modules. It'll be interesting to see how or whether Apple will retain such upgrade capabilities for the Apple Silicon Mac Pro.

 

[joevt]

What's to stop Nvidia from adding CUDA? They have full access to their video card through PCIe connected by Thunderbolt. They don't need anything from Apple as long as they're not planning to use the GPU to display anything, and even then - couldn't they do a DisplayLink type work around? But there would be no display acceleration.

 

[Andropov]

They could do that, but I doubt they would. That would mean releasing a compute-only subset of Metal and introducing an entirely new driver substack for a fairly niche feature... They could also introduce a new type of DriverKit driver for high-performance PCIe devices which would allow third-party to write their custom drivers for macOS, but who would even bother. Besides, that would potentially open the way for Nvidia to offer CUDA on macOS again and Apple doesn't want that.

Would they? They could restrict fragment/vertex functions to GPUs that could use UMA and have kernel functions be able to be executed in any Metal-compatible card. And the API to move/manage memory in eGPUs could use the memory storage modes that are already present in macOS for Intel GPUs, which have not been deprecated. In fact, the managed storage mode and blit command encoder had just been added to Catalyst, so they seem to be well-maintained. The whole eGPU stack has been designed recently, so I don't thing they'll throw all of that away.

Also, in WWDC '19 Apple talked somewhat extensively about multiple GPU support for Pro apps and GPU synchronisation. They event went as far as introducing some new features to Metal to make synchronisation easier (MTLSharedEvent). That's just two years ago, and I doubt that's a feature intended for the Mac Pro only.

 

[leman]

Would they? They could restrict fragment/vertex functions to GPUs that could use UMA and have kernel functions be able to be executed in any Metal-compatible card. And the API to move/manage memory in eGPUs could use the memory storage modes that are already present in macOS for Intel GPUs, which have not been deprecated.

Oh, it's definitely possible, I am just skeptical that they would be interested in implementing the necessary changes for a niche use case. There is also another consideration which is probably more important. Intel Macs already have all the necessary drivers, supporting eGPUs was a low hanging fruit (all they had to do is improve the hot-plug device notifications and add some basic UI and voila, eGPUs!). Apple Silicon would require porting over the driver stack... who is going to do that and what motivation would they have? I am sure that there are users that would be interested in using large external GPUs for scientific computation or rendering, but are there enough for AMD to say "ok, we will now spend significant financial resources to support drivers on Apple Silicon"?

In fact, the managed storage mode and blit command encoder had just been added to Catalyst, so they seem to be well-maintained.

Intel Macs will still be around for years to come and Apple wants people to share code between iOS and macOS, so I don't find it very surprising. As to bait command encoder, it's still a very important functional block on Apple Silicon machines as it allows you to schedule asynchronous data copies and data conversions (we should not forget that textures can have opaque hardware-specific layout to optimize data access, bit command encoder takes care of that for you).

The whole eGPU stack has been designed recently, so I don't thing they'll throw all of that away.

As I wrote above, eGPU support is a fairly trivial functionality given the fact that GPUs already hang one the PCI-e bus and the drivers are available. It was something that was cheap for Apple to implement and had a positive PR effect. I doubt that there are too many people actually using eGPUs though, it's a very niche application. It wouldn't be the first relatively short-lived feature on Apple's list.

Also, in WWDC '19 Apple talked somewhat extensively about multiple GPU support for Pro apps and GPU synchronisation. They event went as far as introducing some new features to Metal to make synchronisation easier (MTLSharedEvent). That's just two years ago, and I doubt that's a feature intended for the Mac Pro only.

That's why I am speculating that Mac Pro will eventually feature multiple compute boards that can communicate in NUMA fashion.

 

[quarkysg]

That's why I am speculating that Mac Pro will eventually feature multiple compute boards that can communicate in NUMA fashion.

Essentially back to the multi-socket PowerMac G5 days. Heh heh.

 

[Andropov]

Oh, it's definitely possible, I am just skeptical that they would be interested in implementing the necessary changes for a niche use case. There is also another consideration which is probably more important. Intel Macs already have all the necessary drivers, supporting eGPUs was a low hanging fruit (all they had to do is improve the hot-plug device notifications and add some basic UI and voila, eGPUs!). Apple Silicon would require porting over the driver stack... who is going to do that and what motivation would they have? I am sure that there are users that would be interested in using large external GPUs for scientific computation or rendering, but are there enough for AMD to say "ok, we will now spend significant financial resources to support drivers on Apple Silicon"?

Ah, you're right. I was thinking on the changes needed on the Metal side, not the drivers. I have no idea of how difficult it would be to port the drivers to Apple Silicon.

 

[JMacHack]

Or will apple continue to be an apple and not care about AAA titles till they develop an nvidia/amd equivalent?

Hot take: Why would Apple care about gaming when the gaming community is actively hostile to Apple?

Moreover, why does anyone care about a game that released unfinished and buggy? Extrapolating that, AAA games suck donkey nuts anyway. $60 for a half-baked game where half the content is locked behind microtransactions? No thank you. Full-price multiplayer only casino simulators aren’t worth time thinking about, let alone catering to.

In fact, most of Steams top ten most played games are older than five years. AAA releases last about a month on the leaderboard then people stop playing for the next flavor of the month.

 

[TopherMan12]

Hot take: Why would Apple care about gaming when the gaming community is actively hostile to Apple?

Moreover, why does anyone care about a game that released unfinished and buggy? Extrapolating that, AAA games suck donkey nuts anyway. $60 for a half-baked game where half the content is locked behind microtransactions? No thank you. Full-price multiplayer only casino simulators aren’t worth time thinking about, let alone catering to.

In fact, most of Steams top ten most played games are older than five years. AAA releases last about a month on the leaderboard then people stop playing for the next flavor of the month.

Gaming hostility towards Apple is Apple's fault, not the gaming community's. If Apple wants a part of the gaming market (which is growing dramatically) then it is up to Apple to create a product that is appealing to gamers. They haven't done that.

Most games where you pay $60 does not have content locked behind MTs. I've been gaming for years and the vast majority of AAA games I've played only required the initial purchase and nothing more.

 

[JMacHack]

Gaming hostility towards Apple is Apple's fault, not the gaming community's. If Apple wants a part of the gaming market (which is growing dramatically) then it is up to Apple to create a product that is appealing to gamers. They haven't done that.

If Apple would make something to cater to the PCMR crowd it’d just be another Windows prebuilt box. And the PCMR crowd does not care for prebuilts, they build their own (except now with ridiculous gpu prices, ha!)

Also, Apple has a significant slice of the gaming pie in mobile, which is far less hostile and honestly more profitable than AAA.

I’m willing to grant that they would stand to make a fair bit of profit more since gamers are paypigs in the worst way, but I certainly wouldn’t attempt it.

 

[guzhogi]

I find Apple uses a very monolithic system for hardware instead of modular. This can help streamline things, and make them more powerful and/or power efficient. However, with that and using fairly proprietary components (CPU/GPU, SSDs, etc.), it makes repairing and upgrading components a pain in the ass. Instead of just replacing faulty/old RAM or GPU, you have to get a whole new device. Apple device are great when they work, terrible when you want to fix or upgrade something.

 

[leman]

I find Apple uses a very monolithic system for hardware instead of modular. This can help streamline things, and make them more powerful and/or power efficient. However, with that and using fairly proprietary components (CPU/GPU, SSDs, etc.), it makes repairing and upgrading components a pain in the ass. Instead of just replacing faulty/old RAM or GPU, you have to get a whole new device. Apple device are great when they work, terrible when you want to fix or upgrade something.

Which is why AppleCare is now a subscription service instead of a limited warranty. I hope they will start offering it outside USA as well…

 

[Andropov]

Gaming hostility towards Apple is Apple's fault, not the gaming community's. If Apple wants a part of the gaming market (which is growing dramatically) then it is up to Apple to create a product that is appealing to gamers. They haven't done that.

Most games where you pay $60 does not have content locked behind MTs. I've been gaming for years and the vast majority of AAA games I've played only required the initial purchase and nothing more.

To be fair, even if they made a product appealing to gamers, they wouldn't have enough studios making games for the platform to compete. AAA games are now treated as exclusive strategic assets to guide gamers to certain platforms, and too many of the big studios belong to one of the major players already. How could Apple enter that market?

 

[JouniS]

To be fair, even if they made a product appealing to gamers, they wouldn't have enough studios making games for the platform to compete. AAA games are now treated as exclusive strategic assets to guide gamers to certain platforms, and too many of the big studios belong to one of the major players already. How could Apple enter that market?

The exclusive games are a small minority, and they usually target certain subgroups of gamers. If you usually play action or sports games, exclusive releases may be something you have to consider. I'm more in the RPG / strategy / simulation crowd myself, and I've never heard of an interesting game being exclusive to a single platform.

 

[Colstan]

I'm more in the RPG / strategy / simulation crowd myself, and I've never heard of an interesting game being exclusive to a single platform.

I'm in the same group. 90%+ of the computer games that I play are isometric turn-based RPGs. I had stopped gaming when I switched to Mac back in 2006. When I started gaming again a couple of years ago, I was surprised that nearly all the games I wanted to play have a Mac version. So, in that respect, I am fortunate.

I had been concerned when the "big two" for this year, Baldur's Gate 3 and Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous were announced and no Mac versions was mentioned. However, when actual details were released, a Mac version for both are planned. I would note that Owlcat dropped support for Linux with Wrath, but kept the Mac version. So, for at least some studios, there is a profit motive for supporting the Mac. It may not apply to all "AAA" titles (an entirely subjective term which I don't particularly like) but Mac support isn't simply a hobby for some developers.

 

[Yebubbleman]

Hi

Can apple silicon work with an eGPU? Is there a hardware restriction?

No. And it's not a hardware restriction as much as a restriction of the OS and system architecture.

Speculative:

Also, Will the new M1x or M2 devices with n graphic cores be able to play a buggy cyberpunk at 1440/60?

Cyberpunk is not native to macOS, let alone the Apple Silicon versions of macOS. If you're talking about via CrossOver and Rosetta 2, then I'm unsure. Maybe?

If not, could M3 or M4 devices in future do it?

Or will apple continue to be an apple and not care about AAA titles till they develop an nvidia/amd equivalent?

Most of what made gaming on the Mac viable for a time was that it was using the same Intel processors and architecture as what you'd find on Windows PCs. Them switching away from Intel goes back to making this sort of thing harder which is why they're counting more on mobile titles getting converted to Mac rather than PC titles. It's still a poor move, but Apple has seldom been great about handling gaming on the Mac.

 

[Andropov]

The exclusive games are a small minority, and they usually target certain subgroups of gamers. If you usually play action or sports games, exclusive releases may be something you have to consider. I'm more in the RPG / strategy / simulation crowd myself, and I've never heard of an interesting game being exclusive to a single platform.

Are they? That's certainly not my impression. I tried searching for some statistics but it's hard to find an appropriate metric.

I can't think of a console that flourished without major platform-exclusive games though. Even if most cross-platform games got ported to the Mac, why would anyone buy a Mac for gaming to have a fraction of the games released for PC? Even if it were a big fraction, there would be titles being PC-only (specially now that Microsoft seems to be in a quest to buy all the studios). There's no future for a gaming platform without exclusive games nowadays.

Apple tried. Steve Jobs presented Halo: Combat Evolved at the keynote in MacWorld 1999. It didn't end up very well for them.