I know there have been several posts about eGPU usage on here, but I wanted to specifically mention Adobe performance with an eGPU since there's not a a ton of information out there (at least I couldn't find much specific to the 2018 mini and adobe).
My Specs: MM 2018 i7 32gb RAM 512GB SSD. Sonnet 550 with Sapphire Pulse Vega 56. DELL S2715H Display (HD).
First off, I could tell right away that things were running smoother. Since I'm only running on a single HD monitor, I never had any issue with the built-in GPU. However, the added smoothness was nice. First thing I did was open up Adobe PP and start editing. All of my footage is 4K shot on a LUMIX G85 in MPEG-4 at 60 FPS.
For my first experiment, I overlapped four 4K shots with an adjustment layer applied with some Gaussian blur on the top track. Everything runs smoothly on the timeline. Vega card is at 100% usage and the UHD 360 is around 50% usage. I'm glad the new Adobe update allows use of multiple GPU's. Exporting this video in Adobe PP preferred the UHD 360 over the Vega. Both were being used, but this time the UHD was at 100% and the Vega was around 30% usage. This is the same for Media Encoder, though render times were faster. I imagine this is something Adobe is still working on...
My second experiment, I opened up an AE project I had been working on. Without going into too much detail, this project uses a lot of little shapes that all move independently. Runs great! Super smooth. Vega card was never at 100%. It did drop some frames when I added a sequence that animated some text over all of the moving shapes. However it didn't take long to render previews. I'm super happy.
Summary: I love the eGPU. I wish rendering utilized it more, but I'm staying positive this is something Adobe is working on. Timeline performance is amazing though!
Side Note: I also used PP and AE on a custom-built PC for over 2 years. That machine had a liquid cooled 6-core i7 with 32gb ram, 512 SSD and a GTX Nvidia 1080. For render times, the custom PC was the clear winner here. However, for timeline performance, the Mac Mini with eGPU actually performs better! I'd imagine some of this is due to the SSD's in the mini being much faster, and the Mac mini has a newer i7 that's clocked higher.
My Specs: MM 2018 i7 32gb RAM 512GB SSD. Sonnet 550 with Sapphire Pulse Vega 56. DELL S2715H Display (HD).
First off, I could tell right away that things were running smoother. Since I'm only running on a single HD monitor, I never had any issue with the built-in GPU. However, the added smoothness was nice. First thing I did was open up Adobe PP and start editing. All of my footage is 4K shot on a LUMIX G85 in MPEG-4 at 60 FPS.
For my first experiment, I overlapped four 4K shots with an adjustment layer applied with some Gaussian blur on the top track. Everything runs smoothly on the timeline. Vega card is at 100% usage and the UHD 360 is around 50% usage. I'm glad the new Adobe update allows use of multiple GPU's. Exporting this video in Adobe PP preferred the UHD 360 over the Vega. Both were being used, but this time the UHD was at 100% and the Vega was around 30% usage. This is the same for Media Encoder, though render times were faster. I imagine this is something Adobe is still working on...
My second experiment, I opened up an AE project I had been working on. Without going into too much detail, this project uses a lot of little shapes that all move independently. Runs great! Super smooth. Vega card was never at 100%. It did drop some frames when I added a sequence that animated some text over all of the moving shapes. However it didn't take long to render previews. I'm super happy.
Summary: I love the eGPU. I wish rendering utilized it more, but I'm staying positive this is something Adobe is working on. Timeline performance is amazing though!
Side Note: I also used PP and AE on a custom-built PC for over 2 years. That machine had a liquid cooled 6-core i7 with 32gb ram, 512 SSD and a GTX Nvidia 1080. For render times, the custom PC was the clear winner here. However, for timeline performance, the Mac Mini with eGPU actually performs better! I'd imagine some of this is due to the SSD's in the mini being much faster, and the Mac mini has a newer i7 that's clocked higher.
