Can Daz Studio use an eGPU?
barrieM
Posts: 292
I have a Black Magic eGPU on my 2018 Mac Mini. I set "Prefer external GPU" button in the apps info tab and restarted DS. The GPU does not show in the Advanced render settings tab.
I have DS version 4.22.0.16 and Mac OS Sanoma 14.5. The graphics card is Radeon Pro 580 8 GB.
Given this information, Should DS recognise this eGPU?
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Comments
As far as I can tell, no one has gotten this to work with Daz studio.
The Blackmagic eGPU has an AMD card in it, which means that even if you got it to work, it would only be able to boost dForce simulations.
Thank you. I just found out the driver needs to be installed.
@Gordig Blackmagic eGPU supports openGL Are you saying it won't help with rendering?
I don't know if it would help with openGL rendering, but 3Delight is CPU-only (as is Filament, as far as I know), Iray can only be accelerated by an NVidia GPU, Octane requires an NVidia GPU to even function...the only render engine DS supports that MIGHT be accelerated by an AMD GPU is LuxCore/Reality, and I'm not even sure what the current state of those are.
Thank you. Your comments are big help and saves a lot of further research time.
You can use an egpu, as long as it's Nvidia, just not with a mac.
AFAIK, Nvidia hasn't been supported on macs for several years.
Thank you. Iwas aware of the rift between Apple and Nvidia. I thought my eGPU (with OpenGL) would be compatable with iRay but didn't realize DS only supported Nvidia eGPU's..
Again, the AMD GPU would be COMPATIBLE with DS, it just wouldn't help with rendering. Accelerating an Iray render requires CUDA cores, which are NVidia's proprietary technology. There is a way to emulate CUDA with an AMD GPU, but from what I've seen it's not that stable, and CUDA is only half the battle. Optix is another NVidia technology that really boosts renders, and with the new RTX cards, RT and tensor cores. There's a reason why nearly every render engine that can be GPU-accelerated works with NVidia cards (the only exception I can think of being AMD's own proprietary renderer), but only some of them with AMD.
I've experimented with the Mac / DS / eGPU combo for a long, long time a while ago, and to sum it up, it really is no use unless NVidia and Apple reconcile. Or DS starts using other cards for rendering, of course.
Another thing is that external cards still are not nearly as powerful as the same card in an internal slot afaik, because of the slower connection obviously; and with DS, that really tells. You'll want to squeeze every ounce of performance you can get of your card, and the eGPU set up throttles this massively. So even on PC to which I then switched, it wasn't that much fun. If you're doing more than casual renders with few objects, you'll want to get something internal I should say. Sorry for the bad news!
filament does work with amd, iray is limited to nvidia, 3delight is cpu only
Thank you all for your information and education. My Mac Mini cpu does a good job with iray, just a little slow. Thank you again,this thread has saved me a lot of precious time.
Does DS's implementation of Filament also work with AMD?
@gordig There's no "DAZ implementation" of filament as there's no "DAZ implementation" of iray. What DAZ does is to pass the scene data, but the engine itself with its features and hardware support is independent from DAZ. So yes filament works with any gpu.