Nvidia 1080ti with new drivers in external enclosure quadruples MacBook Pro native performance

Enthusiasts have wasted no time in testing the new Nvidia Pascal video card drivers, and have found external GPU performance nearly four times that of the Radeon Pro 450 in the 15-inch MacBook Pro.

External GPU enthusiast site egpu.io has affixed a GTX 1080 Ti to an AKiTiO Note and Mantiz Venus enclosure — similar to that used for AppleInsider testing in January. While the cards may be hamstrung slightly by the Thunderbolt 3 interface not being as fast as a 16x PCI-E slot, the results are nonetheless impressive.

In a best-case scenario utilizing benchmarks, the 15-inch MacBook Pro with Radeon Pro 450 scores 5822 on the Luxmark 3.1 benchmark, with the Radeon Pro 460 scoring 6056.

An external GPU feeding video back to the screen of the same MacBook scores 22,673 with a Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 Ti, and 23,172 with the newly enabled 1080 Ti. At this time, the group does not have the new Nvidia Titan Xp video card for testing.

Other benchmarks have similar gaps in performance. the Valley 1.0 test scores 706 on the Radeon Pro 450, and 2353 with the 1080 Ti on the internal display — climbing to 3031 on an external.

The Heaven 4.0 test scores 360 on the Radeon Pro 450. Demonstrating what can happen when Thunderbolt 3 bandwidth is constrained, the Heaven 4.0 test on the 1080 Ti routed to the internal display measures 1422, but nearly doubles to 2640 when sent to an external display.

Also recently discovered by eGPU.io is the fact that on the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar, the Thunderbolt 3 controllers are attached to the PCH-H controller. As a result, available bandwidth to Thunderbolt 3 devices can be constrained by other components connected through the PCH-H controller — including the flash storage on the computer.

On the 15-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar, the Thunderbolt 3 controllers are directly connected to the CPU, eliminating any possible bottleneck through the PCH-H controller.

AppleInsider's own testing on eGPU suitability for users will continue with a Mantiz enclosure, and a casing from Bizon.

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34 Comments

mdriftmeyer 7395 comments · 20 Years

About 7 years ago

And when the next Macbook Pro debuts with a Vega HBM2.0 GPGPU discrete GPU that lead gap will plunge considerably to a cost loss for purchasing those eGPUs.

zimmie 651 comments · 9 Years

PCIe throughput matters less than most people think for most GPU use. You can block off PCIe lanes with tape. On most GPUs in most games, there is no difference at all dropping it from 16 lanes to eight. When you drop to four lanes, you typically get longer loading times and a small framerate drop. Dropping to two lanes typically gives significantly longer loading times and >30% framerate drops.

This can matter for OpenCL use, but it frequently does not. PCIe throughput is only really used getting your dataset into the video card's RAM and getting the result out. It will slow down some really trivial data manipulation, and it will be slower to work on datasets too large for the card's RAM. Anything which requires more than a few seconds to compute won't be meaningfully slower on an eight-lane or four-lane bus.

tylersdad 310 comments · 13 Years

mdriftmeyer said:

And when the next Macbook Pro debuts with a Vega HBM2.0 GPGPU discrete GPU that lead gap will plunge considerably to a cost loss for purchasing those eGPUs.

I think it's very unlikely that Apple's first GPU will be able to leapfrog, or even come close to the same performance that nVidia achieves. nVidia's been doing this for decades.

tmay 6452 comments · 11 Years

tylersdad said:

mdriftmeyer said:

And when the next Macbook Pro debuts with a Vega HBM2.0 GPGPU discrete GPU that lead gap will plunge considerably to a cost loss for purchasing those eGPUs.

I think it's very unlikely that Apple's first GPU will be able to leapfrog, or even come close to the same performance that nVidia achieves. nVidia's been doing this for decades.

Yet, Nvidia couldn't translate that performance to a low power envelope with Tegra. Perhaps Apple's advantage lies with integrating a Cannon Lake generation CPU w/integrated graphics with a Apple GPGPU optimized for Mac OS and Metal, rather than Windows and Direct X.

Either way, I like the promise of a TB 3 connected GPU, though can imagine a higher level of integration including a power supply in a smaller form factor being more desirable than through an external drive enclosure with PCIe slot.

foggyhill 4767 comments · 10 Years

tylersdad said:

mdriftmeyer said:

And when the next Macbook Pro debuts with a Vega HBM2.0 GPGPU discrete GPU that lead gap will plunge considerably to a cost loss for purchasing those eGPUs.

I think it's very unlikely that Apple's first GPU will be able to leapfrog, or even come close to the same performance that nVidia achieves. nVidia's been doing this for decades.

NVDIA gets creamed in low power env, so yeah, they can "leapfrog" it, not problem, especially if they design the GPU to integrate tightly with CPU.
This will provide them with something nobody else has. the SOC is probably littered with DSP's already so that's just one step more in co-processing for the CPU.