> It has become very clear that gaming is not only high-performance, but super practical on an 11" Macbook Air.
I think we have different operational definitions of "practical" here.
Attaching a Thunderbolt GPU to a Macbook Air
51–60 of 102 posts
Re: Attaching a Thunderbolt GPU to a Macbook Air
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
You need Apple drivers, and Apple only makes drivers for video cards they support. So it would not be quite that straightforward.
A vendor can create their own drivers. This happens all the time for hardware made for the existing Mac Pro.
The existing Mac Pro is quite old. Are graphics cards still being made that support it?
Re: Attaching a Thunderbolt GPU to a Macbook Air
#53Let's be honest: The Thunderbolt ecosystem is tragic. - We're only now seeing the first docks come available. It only took Belkin an extra year to develop it. - The hopes and dreams of internal buses being used outside the standard case is still only a dream unless you are willing to pay extreme premiums. Even then there is still no native solution for video. - I still need a special cord from Apple to run Dual-link.…
Ugh, don't get me started on the $300 Belkin Docks. ($250 for the Matrox DS1 / $400 for the Sonnet Echo 15!)
I feel like I'm living in the early days of VHS (USB3) vs. BetaMax (ThunderBolt) right now: Expensive, and while BetaMax is technically better, VHS will win on price & availability.
Re: Attaching a Thunderbolt GPU to a Macbook Air
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can put together a good gaming machine for $250? That seems a bit low to me but I haven't priced computer parts in a while.
$250 is too low. But the whole setup with MBA with 512 GB SSD, 8 GB RAM and i7 CPU, the GPU and then the $250 in parts is not only enough money for powerful desktop computer, it is enough money for cheaper MBA variant and then powerful desktop computer.
But then you don't have a Macbook Air for when you want a great portable OS X machine with excellent battery life.
Re: Attaching a Thunderbolt GPU to a Macbook Air
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Me too. It's sad to read that Intel is blocking the release of such a product. I don't want a separate gaming system, I want an addon for my mac.
Apart from cost - what's preventing this from working with something like the Echo-Express pro? http://www.sonnettech.com/product/echoexpresschassis.html - are there software limitations that will prevent a graphics-card from working in that chassis?
Bandwidth. We can (and already have) gotten video cards working across external links, but they are severely bandwidth constrained.
Thunderbolt is constrained to 10Gbit (20Gbit in some contrived used cases if your'e using Thunderbolt2). A 16-lane PCI-e gaming video card consumes anywhere between 32Gbit and 126Gbit (with modern cards coming in on the high end of that).
So you can get it working, but it'd be mostly pointless. The main impetus for an external video card is to get desktop-like video performance for demanding applications like gaming, but you are heavily bus-bottlenecked which reduces the video performance to a small fraction of its potential.
Re: Attaching a Thunderbolt GPU to a Macbook Air
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is this necessarily true? If you can get drivers for the video card, wouldn't it work?
You need Apple drivers, and Apple only makes drivers for video cards they support. So it would not be quite that straightforward.
What about the driver hacks people made for hackintosh machines?
http://wiki.osx86project.org/wiki/index.php/HCL_10.8.4#Graph...
Re: Attaching a Thunderbolt GPU to a Macbook Air
#57Village Instruments released a ready-made product years ago:
http://www.villageinstruments.com/tiki-index.php?page=ViDock
Re: Attaching a Thunderbolt GPU to a Macbook Air
#58I've been assuming this is what Apple is going to do with the next MBP retina. Intel graphics when headless + a new Thunderbolt Display with built-in Nvidia or ATI card when "docked."
The only issue I see with this is that graphics cards become obsolete much faster than monitors do. I wouldn't want to replace my perfectly good monitor just because the graphics are too slow. The obvious answer is a user replaceable card - but that hardly screams "Apple."
This is what people are used to with laptops, so there is a form of precedent.
Re: Attaching a Thunderbolt GPU to a Macbook Air
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
A vendor can create their own drivers. This happens all the time for hardware made for the existing Mac Pro.
The existing Mac Pro is quite old. Are graphics cards still being made that support it?
My understanding is newer 'PC' cards with EFI firmware are unofficially supported.
Re: Attaching a Thunderbolt GPU to a Macbook Air
#60I've been assuming this is what Apple is going to do with the next MBP retina. Intel graphics when headless + a new Thunderbolt Display with built-in Nvidia or ATI card when "docked."
I've been wondering something similar. Since you can lock in the 'value add' of the display, and the current Cinema display with TB is pretty full of stuff anyway, that you'd get a display with built in GPU rather than a display which is being sent the pixels. Not sure how that compares bandwidth consumption wise but from the ability for drivers to not recognize non Apple hosts its a total win.
Your about $400 from an iMac at that point.