Are EGPUs for M1/M2 MacBook's on Linux Possible?

Question

Three things:1) 2D acceleration with the recent Rust driver in Asahi Linux seems quite attainable, and will enable everyday/office/development use.2) USB 4 should allow suitable bandwidth for an eGPU3) What needs to happen to support say, an Nvidia RTX 3090 in an eGPU case/dock? I'm thinking the 'open source' Nvidia driver needs to be compiled for ARM, and everything pushed to it is code for the internal ISA of the GPU.3D acceleration through an eGPU seems much more possible in the near-term than supporting the internal iGPU of the M1/M2.

minimaul · Accepted Answer

marcan (working on linux on these devices) has talked about this on twitter previously. tl;dr is that while it is kinda technically possible, it would require a lot of changes to existing software and might result in nasty performance issues that could make the whole idea not worth it.https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1534825580801433600

hahamrfunnyguy · Answer

I am on my 2nd laptop PC (HP Spectre) using the same eGPU over TB3, an Akito Node with a GTX 1060. My newest laptop has better hardware acceleration than my previous laptop, but the eGPU is still useful for playing games.I was playing Fortnite quite a bit, but at some point in 2019 they released a patch that made the game unplayable with my eGPU so I haven't played since. So was some commenters have said on this thread already, eGPUs are not well supported.

oneplane · Answer

It's definitely possible, but there are no drivers released by the GPU manufacturers. They may simply not see any benefit of making such an investment, and they might point a finger at Apple for not allowing them the ease of development using kernel access (they would have to make a DEXT or something like that). It's also likely that there isn't really much of a market for it anymore.

uni_rule · Answer

Considering the status of GPUs on hackintosh systems / the Mac Pro I am under the impression that no Nvidia cards after Pascal are supported by MacOS and the ones that are are via various kludges dredging drivers from High Sierra upwards to new versions via OpenCore. Officially, MacOS is firmly in Radeon territory when it comes to dgpus.

Apreche · Answer

There isn't ever going to be official support for it, that's for sure. As for unofficial support, it's going to take some nerds to put that together. It could be you! Go buy one and start working on it. Let us know how it goes. I'm sure you can get a lot of enthusiastic people to help you.
Personally, I think a better and easier option is to just get an entire other computer with the GPU(s) in it. This can either be a physical machine you have, or some GPU cloud instance. Then in situations where the Mac graphics capabilities aren't up to snuff, you can use something like remote desktop or streaming to offload that work to the other machine.
e.g.: Setup a small headless PC on your network that has a powerful GPU and Steam installed. Then run Steam Link on your Mac to play games that don't run natively on MacOS.

anigbrowl · Answer

I was under the impression that the obstacles were at least partly a MacOS issue, because people have encountered difficulties running eGPUs on Intel Macs as well. Would love to hear if/how this is working in the field.

amelius · Answer

My advice would be to get a real industrial computer running Linux instead of relying on consumer electronics.

forrestthewoods · Answer

I have never seen a single review or benchmark of eGPUs that was impressive.