I have an old 2018 Intel MacBook Pro and an eGPU, and the last time I tried it (macOS 13 or 14), current Adobe GPU features still worked on it. I have not tested it on macOS 15 yet.
The eGPU really helped my situation 7 years ago, but if I was thinking about it today I think the value proposition of an eGPU has gotten worse. I would not necessarily recommend committing to it for production work at this time unless you’re prepared to do some potential troubleshooting, and also, you buy the gear from places with easy return policies in case one component or another doesn’t work out.
For this to work, you need:
- An eGPU enclosure.
- A compatible graphics card that meets the recommended, not minimum, Photoshop/Camera Raw/Lightroom system requirements.
- A Thunderbolt cable long enough to reach from the MacBook Pro to the eGPU. If you want the boxy eGPU out of the way and under your desk, a good Thunderbolt cable that’s long enough (1m or more) can be $30–60. Although many eGPUs come with a Thunderbolt cable, it’s usually so short (mine came with an 0.7m cable) that whenever you want to use the eGPU with the cable it came with, you have to have room on the desk to put that big eGPU box right next to the laptop.
- A version of macOS that supports eGPUs reliably.
There are a number of potential risks:
- That combination can run in to the hundreds of dollars. A powerful Apple Silicon Mac mini is just a little more. The eGPU enclosure I bought in 2019 for $330 is now $399 new, and you will have to add the price of a graphics card to that, so you could end up spending $600 or more. Right now there is an M2 Mac mini at the Apple Refurbished store that has 24GB Unified Memory and 10-core GPU for just $839…I’d totally take that instead of an eGPU.
- An eGPU isn’t mobile, since just about all eGPU enclosures require AC power to keep that desktop class GPU fed.
- Apple could drop support for eGPUs at any time. eGPUs did turn out to be the temporary stopgap that some suspected. Since Apple Silicon GPUs were first released 4 years ago, they have turned out to be much more powerful than eGPUs, especially for laptops. Partly because there’s no point in putting more and more powerful GPUs in an eGPU because they will never be able to exceed the 40Gb/sec maximum data rate of Thunderbolt 3 & 4. A GPU on the motherboard can move a lot more data per second to and from the rest of the computer. As more Mac Intel users upgrade to Apple Silicon, the less eGPUs will be needed until they disappear or lose support.
- As you found, Adobe is not very clear about how well they support eGPUs. They might not be putting much effort into testing for them and supporting them. If Apple drops support for eGPUs, Adobe might stop doing any support or bug fixing for eGPUs.
- It works best if the eGPU is routed to an external display, not back to the laptop screen. If it’s routed back to the laptop, now the one Thunderbolt cable has to handle video data both coming and going, which might cut effective throughput in half.
- Although an eGPU helped me get better graphics performance before Apple Silicon Macs appeared, it was a flaky and tempermental setup, a bit of a house of cards. If I didn’t do things in just the right order to connect or disconnect the eGPU, the house of cards would come crashing down. Usually it was OK, but I’m glad to have moved on. The GPU in an Apple Silicon Mac is fast, capable, mobile, battery-efficient, and hassle-free.
At this point, almost half a decade into the Intel to Apple Silicon transition, I think it’s hard to justify throwing all that money at an eGPU with not so competitive performance, and an uncertain and possibly short supported life. If you can find the right components used and cheap, that would be better. But I think the money would be better spent toward an Apple Silicon Mac with 24GB or more of Unified Memory, to make enough memory availble to the Apple Silicon GPU to take full advantage of current AI features and GPU acceleration.
I got an M1 Pro MacBook Pro over three years ago, and even though it’s a base model that is now totally outclassed by the newer M2/M3/M4 models, it still processes graphics faster than my Intel Mac with eGPU. If I were in your shoes and I couldn’t afford a new M3/M4, I would put the eGPU money toward a good used M1/M2 Pro or better; by now prices on those should be a lot closer to what a good eGPU costs new. If you’re willing to put up with the non-mobile AC requirement of an eGPU, then you would be willing to put up with a non-mobile used or old Apple Silicon Mac mini that would cost only a little more than an eGPU enclosure plus graphics card.
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