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I am a newby considering setting up the following system, but I am concerned whether or not it will work. Can anyone give me some insight?

Macbook pro late 2013 (supports metal 2) with dedicated nvidia GPU. Currently running 10.14. Note that I have thunderbolt 2, and that egpu support is not "officially" supported. You have to enable it like in the following:

https://egpu.io/forums/mac-setup/potentially-accelerate-all-applications-on-egpu-macos-10-13-4/ 

To make my system more blender friendly, I was considering something like a RX 580, or maybe vega 56-64 egpu in a thunderbolt 3 chassis.

I would use the following equipment:

Apple Thunderbolt Cable (2.0 m) - White - Apple 

Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) to Thunderbolt 2 Adapter - Apple 

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07Q78VMPW/ref=twister_B07GSDLQ1D?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1

Thanks! I'm excited to maybe join the community!

David
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  • Welcome to Blender's StackExchange! Unfortunately the GPU support on macOS is a bit complicated. Apple has deprecated their OpenCL support, which is why Blender 2.80 will not support GPU rendering on AMD graphics cards out of the box. You may still be able to use it through AMD Radeon™ ProRender but not with Cycles. That is why I wouldn't suggest buying AMD GPUs when you're using macOS. – Robert Gützkow Oct 14 '19 at 14:51
  • Would a nvidia card in an external chassis have the same issue, or would blender recognize it? – David Oct 14 '19 at 15:46
  • That should work, as far as I'm aware, if the GPU has a CUDA compute capability of 3.0 or higher. – Robert Gützkow Oct 14 '19 at 15:53
  • https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/122992/which-mac-should-i-buy-for-blender-2-8/123005#123005 – Duarte Farrajota Ramos Oct 14 '19 at 16:38

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