Blackmagic eGPU – Thunderbolt 3 external graphics processor

Re:Blackmagic eGPU – Thunderbolt 3 external graphics processor by jasonjs on Friday July 13, 2018 @02:49AM (#17520980)

Even before the more polished products existed, people have hacked together external GPU enclosures, often interfaced to the host's PCIe bus via ExpressCard slots or ribbon cables hanging off of Mini PCIe slots. And more recently, with the interest in cramming many dual-slot GPUs onto a single motherboard for cryptomining rigs, you can find cheap, "barebones stand-alone PCIe slots" (for lack of a better term) for hanging GPUs off of. A quick search turned up a couple of examples:

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Mini-PCI-E-to-PCI-E-1X-Expan...

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/60CM-PCI-Express-1X-To-16X-P... (Ingeniously, on this one, they've re-purposed USB 3.0 cables to carry the high-speed PCIe lanes).

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Re:Blackmagic eGPU – Thunderbolt 3 external graphics processor by gambiting on Friday July 13, 2018 @05:16AM (#17521525)

The problem with all of those has always been that they only worked with an external display - there never was any way to send the image back to the laptop's own display.

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Re:Blackmagic eGPU – Thunderbolt 3 external graphics processor by washadjeffmad on Friday July 13, 2018 @07:22AM (#17521959)

LookingGlass on Linux allows displaying from other GPUs' framebuffers.

We use Resolve in VM with hardware passthrough and can monitor its display output from within another VM this way.

Apple nails the prosumer, but I really don't see many using their hardware in industry.

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Re:Blackmagic eGPU – Thunderbolt 3 external graphics processor by hddherman on Friday July 13, 2018 @09:35AM (#17522817)

It actually is possible with nVidia GPU-s, but you'll be taking a huge performance hit as some of the tiny bandwidth is now used to send the rendered image back to the laptop and then to the screen.

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Re:Blackmagic eGPU – Thunderbolt 3 external graphics processor by Zephyreks on Friday July 13, 2018 @03:23PM (#17525897)

No matter what, sending it back to the internal display is going to mean a significant performance hit. There's only so much bandwidth in a TB3 connection.

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Re:Blackmagic eGPU – Thunderbolt 3 external graphics processor by dogma1138 on Friday July 13, 2018 @04:38AM (#17521389)

These are for mining USB 3.0 cables are the standard they have the correct number of pins for a single lane and have decent shielding.

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