Does an eGPU improve Final Cut Pro X performance? (with 2013 Mac Pro & 13" MacBook Pro)

[@ConstantGeekery]

Want MORE eGPU performance? kzbin.info/www/bejne/fomleIuegMx4rdU

[@ConstantGeekery]

Couple of mistakes: the MacBook Pro GPU is Iris Plus 655 (not Iris Pro 955, which doesn’t even exist 😳), and; I appear to have invented a whole new scale for the bottom bars on the chart... numbers are correct though. Sorry folks.

[@WWPTV]

Holy Loud Ads for FCPX. I felt like my soundbar was going to give up the ghost. So I found this video excellent as it charts the path I want to go with the exception of going the Black Magic route. I just like the Apple-ish looks of the device.

[@WarriorsPhoto]

I was shocked by that background render timeline. But it'll help in most tasks therefore it's a worthwhile investment. I am going to watch your last video now.

[@JaimeAndresMedia]

This was exactly the video I was looking for. Awesome job... Thank you! I might do a video to follow on this one: I have a 2018-15" MacBook Pro (2.2ghz, 6-core i7, 16Gb RAM), It works great for most of the video editing I do, except when I'm doing heavy grading and effects. I am now using MVFX MO2 for 3D graphics and it is sluggish as hell! I would love to have better performance with background rendering while editing, but I don't want to upgrade to an iMac or MacPro, not only because of the $$ but also because of lack of portability, so I figured an eGPU would be the best option, and just use it at home when working on my videos. I just ordered the eGPU setup you have with the 5700XT and I can't wait to test it out, my laptop has the Radeon Pro 555x 4GB which is not bad, but the 5700xt has twice the power (or at least it's supposed to be) hoping that it will make a big difference.

[@ConstantGeekery]

Thank you 😊 You will see an improvement. I tried it out recently with a 15” MBP that has a 560X in it, and the eGPU speeds things up. If you watch my latest videos, you’ll see how to work around the driver bug and get much more performance - it’s more like 3x the performance, depending on how you’re using it.

[@JaimeAndresMedia]

Constant Geekery thank you!!🙏🏼

[@mereobserver1727]

Thanks for doing it! Much appreciate the format and analysis. On a side, here are some video topics that might be of interest to you (to experiment with), at some point in the future: 1) FCPX, multitasking and RAM constraints. While 16GB and above are a norm for pros, a lot of Apple’s user base are stuck with 8GB worth soldered BGA chips on base models of 2019 and earlier 13” MBPs, MBAs, 12” MacBooks, etc. As such, how much are they missing out compared to 16GB in real-life scenarios (e.g. few browser tabs, image editor, FCPX, perhaps even Motion, all running at once)? To emulate a lower RAM setup, either a RAM drive or virtualization software like Parallels can do. Presumably, lots of paging would be going on - but in practice, how big of a hit (if any) is it for system and timeline performance, stability, spinning beach balls? 🍭 2) Crowdsourcing standardized test results from your audience. From synthetics like BruceX to actual sample projects - it could be a fun way to engage with viewers and gain extra insights on performance factors - assuming all of us use modern storage and FCPX v 10.4.8 or newer. I’d be happy to participate.

[@ConstantGeekery]

Great ideas! 💡 Thank you. I’ll add those to my list.

[@Technocrat.]

Ohh Exploring ! Always looking forward to your video posts.

[@GuitarJUNO]

really thanks to your great benchmark. it really useful for me :) thank you so much!

[@ConstantGeekery]

Glad it helped 😊

[@enzymebp]

I had very similar experiences. I have a 2013 Mac Pro with D700 graphics and I ran tests with a Vega Frontier Edition EGPU. In most cases the EGPU was slower than the D700 graphics, and those D700s were underutilized when using the EGPU. Even when setting a D700 as the render GPU with an EGPU connected only one D700 was utilized when two would be used in the same scenario with no EGPU connected. Ultimately, not using an EGPU tended to be significantly faster with the D700 chips.

[@heartworkfilms5043]

Bravo! you made a good point, i was just looking for to buy a eGPU, THANKS A LOT you helped me a lot.

[@ConstantGeekery]

Glad I could help!

[@LukeFaulkner]

Great video! Could you do a similar thing for Davinici Resolve? I think you mentioned you might in Part 1 and it'd be really interesting.

[@ConstantGeekery]

Thank you. Yes, I will be doing a Resolve video with the Mac Pro and eGPU. Got a bit distracted with all the Apple Silicon excitements, but there will be more Mac Pro content coming.

[@ben_silver]

Have you tried the secondry dummy monitor adaptor as well? I run the exact same eGPU setup as you and the benchmark tests increase by almost DOUBLE with one of those cheap HDMI 4K dummy adapters attached. It would be interesting to see if it also near doubles the performance while video editing etc. As always, thanks for the informative videos.

[@ConstantGeekery]

I definitely will get one and try it for a future episode! Thank you.

[@bkoleff]

@@ConstantGeekery Yup, after the new FCPX version - you need to run a second monitor or this dummy so you can get the full speed of the egpu. Pretty stupid imo.

[@ConstantGeekery]

Boyan Kolev Very stupid. Thanks for the heads up - I will check it out.

[@tunnelvision_space]

@@ConstantGeekery Looking forward to your findings with the dummy?

[@ConstantGeekery]

TunnelVision filming something along those lines today 😉

[@goobfilmcast4239]

Solid Video with great info..... I am trying to decide between a new Mac Mini or a vintage Mac Pro (I already own a couple of decent monitors and external peripherals)......steering towards the Mac Mini.... not fully upgradeable but more "forward looking"......

[@ConstantGeekery]

That may be a wise choice. Would be nice if Apple announced 10th gen CPUs for the Mini tomorrow...

[@galprod]

Excellent. Thank you

[@juglenzwaan626]

Thanks for this great video. One comment I have to make: the T2 is not taking care of h.264 codec, the intel quicksync does (8 gen intel do have that chip built in, a Xeon don’t). The T2 chip only handles h.265.

[@ConstantGeekery]

Thanks for your comment - something I’ve been trying to get definitive information on for a while, without much success. A combination of things made me arrive at my conclusion. Apple’s VideoToolbox developer API does allow for hardware acceleration of H.264, though I haven’t been able to find a definitive answer on which hardware is actually being used. It’s entirely possible that Apple is using QuickSync for that, but VideoToolbox also applies to iOS development (if I’m not mistaken) and there’s certainly no QuickSync at use there. Of course, the actual hardware mechanism is probably independent of the API. At launch, Apple said the T2 chip supported acceleration of “Apple video codec” and HEVC. Whether the former includes H.264, IDK 🤷🏼‍♂️ I suppose I could test this by using one of the pre-T2 iMacs... though there’s every possibility it will use AMD GPU acceleration as the underlying hardware, though that will depend on the GPU architecture (I’m pretty confident that my 5700XT is not being used for this). I will certainly do more digging, and I do apologise if I’ve given incorrect information. I always try to do good research, and I do remember finding some examples where tests showed faster H.264 encoding with T2 equipped Macs, but I didn’t make a note of the source and I can’t find it again now, which isn’t particularly helpful. Of course, those tests could have been wrong too. Certainly, the T2 would be capable of accelerating H.264, whether Apple actually use it for this, given that other solutions already exist, is another question, and perhaps, as you suggest, they don’t.

[@MiHiHemi]

I do architectural 3D rendering. The Artlantis software I use was running painfully slow when rendering and working on a complex project I’m currently in. I’ve had my Mac Pro since new in 2014 and pretty pleased up to this point. It’s a 6 core and have recently upgraded the RAM to 64 and H.D. to 2TB with the Razer Core X and Radeon RX 5700XT. I’m also on Catalina OS. I was hoping these upgrades would get me productive again but no Joy. No real performance increase that I can tell so pretty disappointed to say the least. Last ditch effort will be a 12 core CPU soon and after that, it is what it is I guess. I’m a little hesitant with that 12 core upgrade as it looks like all that’s available out there are used ones.

[@ConstantGeekery]

Performance gains will always be dependent on how the software uses the GPU. With the Mac Pro, it’s important to boot with the eGPU and run the app on a display connected to the eGPU. Even then, if the software is CPU bound (as a lot of 3D rendering applications are), you won’t see benefit from eGPU. Make sure you are aware of the dual display bug too - I have made a video about this. Adding a second display (or dummy display) almost doubles compute performance with a 5700 XT. You will be lucky to find any new E5 V2 CPUs now, but I wouldn’t be too concerned buying a 12 core. This CPU was specced in a lot of servers, most of which have spent their lives running 24/7 in a dust-free, air conditioned data centre. In CPU terms, this is pretty ideal. Many servers are over-specced to allow headroom for busy periods, and as a result, they spend most of their time hardly working. I’d be far more concerned about buying one that had been pulled from another Mac Pro - switching on off, heating up, cooling down, over and over again. Have a look on eBay for one that’s been pulled from a web server and you should be fine. You’ll also want to drop a message to Artlantis support to double check that their software can make use of the extra cores and whether it will give you a significant performance boost.

[@MiHiHemi]

@@ConstantGeekery Thanks for the reply! Good info.

[@oows]

My macpro 2013 trashcan Montenery egpu doesn’t use egpu for FCPX at all. I set the share/render as egpu, though. Is my case unique? how about yours?

[@francoistroudbal402]

great job man! would be great to see a similar analysis with external storage, SSD/HDD through tb2 and/or 10gbit ethernet (i know 10 isnt available on the mac pro but i was wondering how a tb2 adapter would fare and allow SSD NAS).

[@ConstantGeekery]

I’d like to do that, but I’ve found the TB3 to TB2 adapter only passes power to an external device one way: if you connect a TB2 device to a TB3 computer. It doesn’t work the other way around, so you can’t connect a TB3 SSD to the Mac Pro with the adapter. It could be done with an external PCIe enclosure, but that would be an expensive test. I have plugged a Samsung T5 into the USB 3.1 ports on my eGPU, and I can confirm that it runs at full speed with the 2013 Mac Pro, so I’d be pretty confident that you could put expansion cards (like 10Gbit ethernet and USB-C) into a Thunderbolt PCIe enclosure and get decent performance.

[@francoistroudbal402]

@@ConstantGeekery yea its actually thanks to your video that i found that out about the direction of the cable. Thanks for the info about the exp card, really appreciate!

[@rickg2967]

Id like to see this tested on Adobe software!

[@ConstantGeekery]

I don’t use Adobe, but I’d be happy to provide the source files if anyone wants to do a comparison.

[@KamiKitsuneVA]

How will an 8 core with 64gb of ram and D700 graphics handle Premiere Pro? Just bought one and I'm hoping I can use it for work and school

[@ConstantGeekery]

I would have thought it will be fine. I don’t use Premiere, but mine is happy with FCPx and DaVinci Resolve. ProRes 422 works best in FCP and BM Raw in DaVinci, and I work with both in 4K. H.264 is slower, but still do-able (and completely fine with eGPU). Working at HD, or with proxy media, it’ll be like a hot knife through butter.

[@moodmusik]

Where can we get more info about the various generations of the Apple SSD? Any purchase links as well?

[@ConstantGeekery]

This page is a fantastic resource: beetstech.com/blog/apple-proprietary-ssd-ultimate-guide-to-specs-and-upgrades - I don’t have any purchase links, but they are usually fairly easy to track down on eBay.

[@markjones8121]

Hi, great content. It occurred to me that the TB2 bandwidth throttling maybe due to the FCPX library file being on the SSD on the Mac. I’m betting that if the library file was on an external SSD connected to a eGPU usb3 all that content wouldn’t need to travel down the TB2 cable and back each time for rendering and exporting. The only info sent down the cable would be FCPX communicating with the library file. If all the assets were copied on the library as well or even simply placed on the same SSD.

[@ConstantGeekery]

That’s a very interesting idea. I think in this case it’s not possible since both the USB controller and the hard disk controller live within the host machine. As far as I’m aware, there’s no way for the GPU to directly access these resources without the host being involved. It would be awesome if you could have storage connected directly to the GPU - copy the data first, work without the bottleneck, and send it back to the host as a completed job. I imagine the motivation to develop such things will be limited as eGPU usage over TB2 is quite a niche market, and one that will ultimately disappear completely once these older machines are retired. Love your line of thinking though!

[@markjones8121]

Constant Geekery thanks for the thumbs up on the thinking. I’m seriously torn as to buying a eGPU for my 2015 13” MBP or spending a lot more and getting a TB3 enabled Mini or MBP. The issue is having sufficient RAM and Storage pushes the price up as the base models aren’t suited to complex FCP projects. My last 45 minute project exporting H264 with roughly 4 layers of transparent assets, 25 minutes of animated text effects and 100% colour corrected exported in 13 hours 🤯.

[@ConstantGeekery]

@@markjones8121 13 hours??? Ouch! I'll be putting up a video this week showing how to actually get the full performance from an eGPU with RX5700XT. Thanks to Apple's buggy drivers, the thing has been running at half what it should be. That said, RAM and CPU are definitely factors for video rendering, and when it comes to H.264, you really want something with the T2 chip in it - makes a huge difference! There are some deals to be had at the moment on the 2019 15" MacBook Pro as the old stock finds its way to resellers. I got the top of the range model yesterday for our studio at £1,000 less than it cost new - i9 with 32GB and 1TB SSD for less than the base 16"! Decent performance for video editing on its own, and like lightning with the eGPU.

[@markjones8121]

Constant Geekery WHERE?

[@ConstantGeekery]

Mark Jones jigsaw24.com

[@livingonthetyne]

I have a 13" MacBook Pro 2017 (it has thunderbolt 3) and for the life of it, it just cant edit 4k in any capacity final cut pro just runs so slow it almost stops, takes about 45 min to render. Do you think an egpu will help with that?

[@ConstantGeekery]

I would expect an improvement on any 13” TB3 MacBook Pro. CPU is also a factor, as is RAM. Best results come when you have a display plugged into the eGPU.

[@-.---.--.-.-.]

Looks like Mac Pro 2013 with D700 can get same results as with egpu

[@winterkhan]

hi, i want to use gpu too, but i usually use photoshop, indesign and illustrator. Will it be helpful? CPU load, overall temperature change?

[@ConstantGeekery]

It can help, but it's difficult to recommend in 2023 due to the cost and the power of the new Apple Silicon Macs.

[@winterkhan]

@@ConstantGeekery thanx for answers. i already have 2013 mac pro, i'm thinking of getting razer x core only, i'm considering mac studio or new mac pro but it's 4 times of my budget.

[@bkoleff]

Hmmm, I think you've mistaken the Iris Plus graphics generation? It's 645, not 955?

[@ConstantGeekery]

Yeah, mixed up my 9s and 6s - too much to remember. The i7-8559u has 655.

[@bkoleff]

@@ConstantGeekery :))

[@mereobserver1727]

AFAIK, Intel themselves aren’t consistent here: my Mac also sports Iris Plus 655 (i5-8259U), but comes clocked 150MHz lower than yours. I wonder, if the situation with Ice Lake’s G7 iGPU is similar (across different SKUs).

[@DerekSmyth]

Will a EGPU work on a mid 2014 MacBook Pro?

[@ConstantGeekery]

Yes it should be possible with purge-wrangler. You’ll need a Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2 adapter, and a Thunderbolt 2 cable to connect the eGPU. As always, you’ll want to use an external monitor plugged into the eGPU rather than trying to accelerate the MacBook’s display. eGPU is an expensive upgrade, and the performance benefit doesn’t always represent good value for money, so be sure to do your homework before splashing out.

[@DerekSmyth]

@@ConstantGeekery Thanks you very much. I'm just waiting on a new Mac Mini to arrive and passing the Macbook on to my son. He'd like to use it for gaming hence thinking about the eGPU (and of course the MacMini ;) ). Apple site said it wasn't supported but thought that might have just been because of the connection. Love your content and your thought process.

[@moetarded7757]

More please. Feed me. Lol