PP24 not utilizing eGPU

Scratch what I said in my previous post. Premiere Pro has trouble with three completely different GPU devices in any system (PC or Mac). It is likely that your MBP has its own discrete GPU in addition to the integrated Intel graphics, both of which are enabled. And in the case of your MacBook Pro, the discrete AMD Radeon graphics chip is of a completely different GPU architecture than your external GPU (in this case, the internal GPU is of either the GCN5 or the RDNA1 architecture while the eGPU is of the RDNA2 architecture - all three of which are completely incompatible with one another hardware-wise). In this instance, the eGPU will not be recognized at all in Premiere Pro. There is absolutely no fix at all whatsoever. Apple does not give you a choice; there is absolutely no way at all to disable either of the internal GPUs.

I also have the Sonnet Breakaway Box with a Radeon RX580, but I haven’t used it much since upgrading to an Apple Silicon Mac. But I was curious enough about your question to bring out my old 2018 13" Intel MacBook Pro and connect it to the Breakaway Box again to see what would happen.

First I verified that the eGPU was recognized in macOS System Information. Adobe Lightroom Classic reported it as supported for graphics acceleration.

Then, using a freshly installed Premiere Pro 24.2.1 Build 2 (haven’t used Premiere Pro on it since I got the Apple Silicon Mac):

On first run, Premiere Pro displayed an “Initializing GPU” progress bar I don’t remember seeing before. It took a while to finish, maybe over a minute. Did you see this too?

I created a project and piled several GPU-accelerated effects onto a 1080p clip. It seemed to play back and scrub smoothly. macOS Activity Monitor reported that the RX580 was getting used more than the built-in Intel Integrated graphics. The right half of all graphs was while I was playing back and scrubbing that timeline. The even-numbered cores are probably just hyperthreads since my Core i5 MacBook Pro only has four real cores.

So for my Breakaway Box, Premiere Pro 24 does work with the Sonnet eGPU and my Intel MacBook Pro, and I don’t know why it isn’t working on your Mac.

There are at least three differences between our configurations, although I don’t know if they should affect the results:

My Intel MacBook Pro runs macOS 14, and yours runs macOS 12.

Of course we are using different graphics cards in our eGPUs.

If you have a 16" MacBook Pro, it probably has its own internal discrete graphics card. My 13" does not, it has only Intel integrated graphics. I don’t know if that would cause any difference in how macOS or Premiere Pro would change how the eGPU is recognized in Premiere Pro 24, if it was working in 23.

The probable reason for this is that Adobe, like most software companies, has been concentrating all or most of its Mac resources almost exclusively to the newer Apple Silicon Macs, which do not support eGPUs at all. The result of this is that support for Intel Macs began to be depreciated, which will continue with successive newer versions of the software until that support is completely discontinued.