Will June 2017 iMac support an external graphic card?

[linkmon99]

hey guys, sorry I'm not much of a techie so my question basically is if I buy the 5k imac will I later
be able to connect some sort of better card that I bought which is superior to the radeon pro 580 if I wanted higher performance? Sorry if this is a dumb question!

 

[jcuecker]

The answer is maybe. Right now in beta High Sierra you can run an external eGPU only to drive an external display or VR headset not to accelerate the internal iMac screen. That might change by the time the time High Sierra is out of beta.

 

[linkmon99]

The answer is maybe. Right now in beta High Sierra you can run an external eGPU only to drive an external display or VR headset not to accelerate the internal iMac screen. That might change by the time the time High Sierra is out of beta.

Okay thank you, that sounds promising!

 

[Takuro]

As jcuecker said, it depends on what context you're framing the question. If you mean your end goal is to drive an external display or VR headset (which at the end of the day, is really just a display that you wear on your face), the answer is a definite "yes." All that's required for eGPU use is to have a Thunderbolt 3 capable Mac, and the non-Pro 2017 iMac has two such ports.

If you're talking about driving the internal display, I don't think even Apple's own engineers are sure what the roadmap looks like. There are apparently some technical hurdles caused by this. It remains to be seen if they can find a suitable way to make it work in software, if internal display support is only coming to future hardware, or if internal display support will never be implemented at all. I really doubt that 3rd outcome, though.

 

[fokmik]

hey guys, sorry I'm not much of a techie so my question basically is if I buy the 5k imac will I later
be able to connect some sort of better card that I bought which is superior to the radeon pro 580 if I wanted higher performance? Sorry if this is a dumb question!

in bootcamp , the answer is 99% yes