About to purchase an external GPU

hi there,

for an art installation I’ve been working with Touch Designer for a few years now, recording and archiving input from 4 camera feeds and playing back material over 2 video projectors. I/O runs over two Black Magic Decklink Duo 2 cards. Touch Designer receives commands from Super Collider to do its things composed over time.

I’m running a mac mini 2018 (Mojave OS) and it has quite a bit of trouble keeping up with the different simultaneous processes, which is why I am about to buy an external GPU, with a Radeon™ Pro WX 7100 Graphics card mounted inside.

I am assuming this won’t cause any compatibility issues with Touch Designer, but figured it would be a good thing to be sure and post my question here. Anyone has any experience with this kind of hardware expansion?

Thanks for your response,
Martijn

We haven’t tested external GPUs much in-house. There are reports from people using them on the forum, but there are some catches with them. For example, I think you want to make sure only monitors connected to the external GPU are active. So unfortunately we don’t have a strong answer, but you may want to search the forum for other posts where people have mentioned it.

Here are a few threads from others running eGPU on macOS. For laptops the problems stem from trying to use the internal screen and eGPU together, it seems most people have success when only connecting to the eGPU.

hi Ben,
thanks for your messages, that’s very helpful.
I’m running a Mac Mini so would have to connect a monitor, but, with your notes, I am wondering how to hook up the two videoprojectors I am using…

The graphics card I am thinking of buying has 4 hdmi outs. Would you suggest to channel the two video outputs over the graphics card or keep them running over the Black Magic I/O cards I am currently using?

Thanks again,
Martijn

I think according to report you will have to run all 3 outputs from your eGPU’s outputs, that is the main monitor and the 2 projectors. You will not be able to plugin directly to the HDMI out on the Mac Mini. If you do not need the BlackMagic I would go directly from the GPU, there will be less latency and less ‘stuff’ involved.
This is just my understanding, unfortunately do not have this setup to confirm for you.

and keep one of the black magic i/o cards for camera inputs?

yes, that makes sense

martijn

thanks for your help, Ben

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Hi there,

Finally made it to purchase the eGPU I posted about earlier: Node Titan Thunderbolt 3 dock with a AMD Sapphire Nitro+ Radeon RX580 8G GDDR5.

4 Available outputs which, I was told, should be able to be individually addressed to output separate signals.

Computer: Mac Mini 2018 3,0 Ghz 6-core i5 32GB RAM.

My TouchDesigner project sends output to two independent channels but I can not find how to address the individual outputs of the new graphics card.

In the Finder info window I have selected TouchDesigner to use the eGPU when available, I see activity on the eGPU through Activity Monitor when I startup TouchDesigner, but I can’t allocate the specific output ports…

Is there a library file or driver which has to be loaded beforehand?

Thank you so much for your help!
Martijn