Running Games on a MacBook Pro with an EGPU

Re:Running Games on a MacBook Pro with an EGPU by wjakob on Tuesday July 02, 2019 @07:49PM (#20340415)

The extra-painful part about this whole situation is that it's apparently only due to Apple blocking NVIDIA from signing and publishing their drivers. (for whatever bizarre reason they may have to do that)

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Re:Running Games on a MacBook Pro with an EGPU by soganess on Tuesday July 02, 2019 @08:38PM (#20340675)

I know it stinks for the people who are acustom to Nvidia's workflow, but it is quite hard to feel bad for Nvidia. A bigger fish is doing to them what they do to smaller players.

Nvidia blocks the Nouveau drivers from working properly on Maxwell2 or newer cards: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Nouveau-...

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Re:Running Games on a MacBook Pro with an EGPU by judge2020 on Tuesday July 02, 2019 @09:37PM (#20340881)

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Re:Running Games on a MacBook Pro with an EGPU by kitsunesoba on Wednesday July 03, 2019 @02:15AM (#20342041)

I think there’s more to the story than Nvidia is letting on. It wouldn’t surprise me a single bit if Apple is blocking Nvidia due to something like QA issues — Nvidia’s web drivers are notoriously buggy under macOS and Nvidia seems completely unrepentant about it. Pair this with Nvidia’s unwillingness to share source and collaborate with other companies on development and you’ve got problems.

I currently run an EVGA 980Ti Classified in my hackintosh. It’s great hardware, but with the frequency of glitches that the drivers bring I’m increasingly inclined to sell it and replace it with an AMD card.

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Re:Running Games on a MacBook Pro with an EGPU by snazz on Tuesday July 02, 2019 @08:23PM (#20340615)

Hopefully at some point deep learning and other applications for GPU technology will become vendor-agnostic, as with CPUs. While I can run Linux on either an Intel or an AMD CPU (and many others), it seems awfully silly that I can't run a CUDA application on an AMD GPU.

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Re:Running Games on a MacBook Pro with an EGPU by colechristensen on Tuesday July 02, 2019 @09:34PM (#20340870)

I doubt NVIDIA would invest anywhere near as much on GPU applications if it weren't vendor locked.

I bet if NVIDIA significantly investing in GPU applications the competition would too.

It makes a whole lot of sense for #1 to vendorlock and #2 onwards to promote open standards. (See Microsoft circa 2001 vs. Microsoft today)

If everybody went vendor-agnostic you'd get a lot less support or you would have to find somebody else to pick up the mantle with an economic motive.

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Re:Running Games on a MacBook Pro with an EGPU by gameswithgo on Tuesday July 02, 2019 @08:34PM (#20340662)

there are vendor agnostic ways to do it, but performance is just not very good on AMD gpus.

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Re:Running Games on a MacBook Pro with an EGPU by etaioinshrdlu on Tuesday July 02, 2019 @08:49PM (#20340722)

A bigger problem than the performance is the very poor software support. None of the top frameworks officially support AMD or openCL. Only broken patchsets are available for both tensorflow or pytorch.

Performance is an issue, but the bigger issue is that your model just won't work.

NVIDIA is really the only game in town right now. Google's TPUs are somewhat of an exception but they only sort of count, because you can't just go buy a TPU for training. Makes TPUs a non-starter for a lot of businesses.

What's interesting is the slow pace of change. 3 years ago we were in the exact same place. I don't see it changing overnight.

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Re:Running Games on a MacBook Pro with an EGPU by slavik81 on Tuesday July 02, 2019 @09:37PM (#20340882)

Apple abandoned OpenCL years ago. It's now officially deprecated on macOS. The most recent version they implemented is OpenCL 1.2 (released 2011). For reference, the current version is OpenCL 2.2 (released 2017).

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Re:Running Games on a MacBook Pro with an EGPU by bitL on Wednesday July 03, 2019 @08:31AM (#20343695)

It's both poor software support and poor performance, e.g. Vega 20 has 15TFlops in theory, in practice one could get around 7.5TFlops. And only use models supported by ROCm, custom CUDA kernels used by many models nowadays might not work after cross-compilation to AMD instructions.

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Re:Running Games on a MacBook Pro with an EGPU by mdaniel on Tuesday July 02, 2019 @11:31PM (#20341382)

because you can't just go buy a TPU for training

but that's what this is, right? https://coral.withgoogle.com/products/

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Re:Running Games on a MacBook Pro with an EGPU by hollerith on Tuesday July 02, 2019 @11:43PM (#20341427)

That's for low-power devices.

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Re:Running Games on a MacBook Pro with an EGPU by StreamBright on Wednesday July 03, 2019 @05:10AM (#20342793)

You are implying that there is a significant user base that does deep learning on a single node using MacOS. In my experience supporting data scientists for 10 years this is almost never the case.

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Re:Running Games on a MacBook Pro with an EGPU by bitL on Wednesday July 03, 2019 @08:07AM (#20343533)

Not pros, but when you are a macOS user and want to learn Deep Learning or do some smaller state-of-art models, you are simply out of luck. Or if you are a data scientist on a plane/traveling with no Internet connectivity needing to quickly change something in the model and retrain. With Linux/Windows you have no issue if you have a proper NVidia hardware (1070 and better).

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Re:Running Games on a MacBook Pro with an EGPU by burn_cycle on Tuesday July 02, 2019 @07:22PM (#20340269)

It is indeed very frustrating, especially for those of us who bought Pascal cards before they stopped "working". In the end only the customers suffer.

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