Macbook Pro + eGPU with TouchDesigner

Hi guys, I wanted to give you heads up on my eGPU setup. :slight_smile:

The official eGPU support from Apple is coming soon, but it’s already available with dev-kit and unofficial eGPU enclosures (they are basically the same ). It should run with any PC having a Thunderbolt 3 port. Not all setups are working correctly yet, but the one I’m using seems pretty stable.

My setup is:

  • Macbook Pro (15-inch, 2017) with Radeon Pro 560
  • Akitio Node eGPU enclosure (firmware 23.1)
  • NVIDIA GeForce 1080 Ti

Resuts:

On macOS HighSierra TouchDesigner placed on external screen accelerated by eGPU is working correctly and is stable. I see about 700% performance increase over the laptop’s GPU. When I move the TD window to my laptop’s screen, the rendering switches to laptop’s Radeon and the window content goes red, I can’t do anything about it. I think it’s related to Radeon’s OpenGL drivers. Probably will be fixed on official Apple release.

On Windows (installed via Bootcamp) TouchDesigner works stable both on internal and external screen.

Other card I’ve tested on this machine and eGPU is Radeon RX580. On macOS I’m getting red screen both on external and internal display.

Overall I’m happy with the setup. It may be more reasonable to get a desktop PC or a gaming laptop, but if you already own a good laptop that only lacks a descent GPU or you want a Mac with a strong GPU - it could be a nice solution.

cool! thanks for posting your results!

I have to report that I’m encountering occasional crashes on longer sessions. TouchDesigner becomes unresponsive without returning any crash dumps. I’ll try to narrow the problem to a specific operation.

The setup isn’t ready for production use yet.

Next time you get a crash, can you see if the system has log any crash reports? I find that I don’t always get the dialog saying here’s a crash report. You can find the crash reports via ​Applications->Utilities->Console. The Crash reports will be under User Reports and named TouchDesigner099_date-xxx.crash

Hi, There any updates regarding the TD performance with the eGPU?

There were NVIDIA driver updates both for Mac and Windows since my last post, I’ll perform more testing soon and post error dumps if any crashes happen.

Interested in having a similar setup such as yours and was wondering if there were any updates.

Hi all,

Has anybody tried Razor Core X with AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 to run Touch Designer patches? AMDs are officially supported by apple. I wonder how that would work with touch designer.

Best,

Hi ktatar,

I’m currently running TouchDesigner on a ThinkPad T480 combined with an Razer Core X and an AMD RX Vega 56. However, I can’t really recommend this combination as I’m experiencing some issues with the Syphon/Spout transmission. Please see this thread on the Spout forum for further reference:

What I also noticed is that the frame rate on the internal graphics card (NVIDIA GeForce MX150) is higher than with the RX Vega 56 and TouchDesigner runs a little smoother.

Regards
Nic