High Sierra eGPU support

Hello everyone,

I'm curious as to what will be Resolve's support of this new feature for High Sierra. Is there Beta testing going on now? Does anyone have any info on this?

We're thinking about getting one of the following, if not both, on account of the TB3 connectivity:

- 10core iMac Pro with the Radeon Pro Vega 64 for doing 4K work.
- i7 Macbook Pro with eGPU (if supported) for Dailies.

My question and what makes it interesting, in my opinion, would be the ability to expand the GPU capabilities via eGPU expanssors. I'm just wondering if Resolve will be able to use this new feature.

Any information will be much appreciated.

Coach.

Technically I think Black Magic's level of support will depend on Apple's. In theory the OS makes this service available to applications, and they just use the GPU as if it were installed inside the computer. IOW the apps that are already GPU-aware shouldn't care if it's via eGPU, once support is fully implemented at the OS level. But I may be wrong on that. Maybe some development has to be done to manage the interplay between an eGPU and an internal GPU when things are being processed.

Yes, once it's supported by OSX then for Resolve this will be/should be just another GPU.

It may work fine for HD, but 4K+ may hit issues as even TB3 is not that fast when we talk about 32bit float 4K or 6K frames which travel from GPU to CPU.

3x32bit RGB at UHD 30fps is about 3GB/sec, so this is close to TB3 data layer speed. If data has to travel between CPU and GPU a lot this will be definitely a bottleneck. TB3 is "only" on PCI-E x4 gen3 bus, so this is not that lot when it comes to GPU needs.