Aug 16, 2019  Your Thunderbolt 3-equipped Mac running macOS High Sierra 10.13.4 or later can access additional graphics performance by connecting to an external graphics. As the name suggests, an eGPU is a graphics card that gives your Mac a real performance boost, but instead of being inserted into an internal expansion slot inside the Mac itself, the card is installed into an external box – often referred to as an ‘enclosure’ – that sits outside the Mac. As the name suggests, an eGPU is a graphics card that gives your Mac a real performance boost, but instead of being inserted into an internal expansion slot inside the Mac itself, the card is installed into an external box – often referred to as an ‘enclosure’ – that sits outside the Mac.

• External Graphic Cards For Laptops
• External Graphics Processor Mac
• External Video Card For Mac
• External Gpu Card For Mac
• External Graphics Card For Desktop

External GPUs are in the news lately, what with NVIDIA's announcement offering macOS drivers for its Titan Xp and Apple offering an eGPU Developer Kit for High Sierra, so we thought we'd take a second to explain what, exactly, an external GPU is — and how you'd go about getting one.

External GPUs: Supercharging gaming and video production

All Macs have a CPU, which provides the primary processing power for your computer. But in addition, they have a GPU — a graphics processing unit — designed to drive your computer's screen, external displays, and visuals.

GPUs are what sell high-end Windows gaming laptops and desktops: They keep your favorite game flawless, your external display running smoothly, and visual effects rendering speedy. They're also very important in rendering VR experiences.

But all that power comes at the expense of battery and optimization: Heavy-duty GPUs are frequent power hogs with lots of fan noise and problematic battery life. As such, Apple has historically trended toward putting in GPUs that balanced power with optimization: great for your laptop's battery life; not so great for gamers, VR, or visual effects artists.

Enter external GPUs: Like external hard drives, these essentially allow you to stick a GPU in a Thunderbolt housing, where you can then connect it to your computer; from there, when you run games, VR, and visual apps optimized for that GPU you should see significant performance improvements. Awesome, right? Well, almost.

The cons of an external GPU on your Mac

Here's the issue: Macs won't officially support external GPUs until macOS High Sierra. That's not to say you can't use an external GPU on older operating systems — only that Apple Support won't bail you out if you do something that doesn't agree with your Mac. Proceed at your own risk, here be dragons, et cetera.

In addition, should you decide to use an external GPU, there are only a handful of Thunderbolt enclosures and graphics cards with appropriate Mac drivers — you can't just pick an arbitrary graphics card you'd like to attach to your Mac.

How to use an external GPU with your Mac

Thankfully, you don't have to venture into the void without guidance: The eGPU.io community has put together a huge array of helpful how-tos and setup guides for interested users — I'm looking forward to using their startup guide and forums to make a Thunderbolt 3 eGPU for my MacBook Pro.

External Graphic Cards For Laptops

Questions?

External Graphics Processor Mac

Other questions about external GPUs? Let us know below.

Mac Pro: What you need to know

Main

External Video Card For Mac

STELA for Apple Arcade is a shallow, sadistic, totally fun game

External Gpu Card For Mac

External Graphics Card For Desktop

Can you outrun killer dark shadows? Take leaps of faith into the unknown? Traverse a world where nothing is what it seems? STELA will test your mettle.