The Wolfe - Enhance the GPU performance of virtually any recent-to-modern Mac

Have any of you heard of this? I think it looks interesting. There's an already-funded Kickstarter that has more than doubled its goal in a single day:

www.kickstarter.com/projects/thewolfe/th...ercharge-your-laptop

Would the NVIDIA GTX 950 and 970 be better than the AMD Firepro stuffs that are in the now-obsolete 2013 Mac Pros like mine? It might be a good way to update the GPU since you know you can't just go out and buy new graphic cards and parts for the Mac Pro. But this is heavily marketed towards laptops with Thunderbolt 3. Thunderbolt 2 will work but they say it works best if you have an external display, which makes sense. Thunderbolt 3 would be needed for the bi-directional communication needed on a laptop.

What are your thoughts?

Two thoughts:

1) Your GPU is upgradeable - www.ifixit.com/Guide/Mac+Pro+Late+2013+G...rd+Replacement/21208

2) What GPUs did you opt for? I would think that that machine is still quite valuable.

Larry

What GPU cards are available for me to buy right now for my Mac Pro? None that I seem to find for sale.

And this thing is sub-$400 and transportable. It can be used on laptops. And I'm thinking the GPUs in there are much better than the AMD Firepros (have not done that research yet bu I imagine they're quite a bit newer).

So the dream of the external GPU is finally there ?

If so, I'm wondering why no big company has done it before.

Some years ago I had read that Thunderbolt wasn't fast enough for this.

This looks like a great solution.

Does anyone know how well it will work with FCPX and Motion?

manoucho wrote: So the dream of the external GPU is finally there ?

If so, I'm wondering why no big company has done it before.

Some years ago I had read that Thunderbolt wasn't fast enough for this.

That was also my impression. A GPU requires extremely high bandwidth access to the CPU. I think the M395X in the 2015 iMac 27 has 16 PCIe lanes which might equate to about 8 gigabytes/sec using PCIe 2.0 or maybe 16 gigabytes/sec using PCIe 3.0 (don't know what the 2015 iMac uses). Even that is sometimes too slow, at least as current software like Lightroom is written. I think I've read Adobe say one reason for their performance problems on iMac 27s is the finite bandwidth of transferring data to and from the GPU.

I think Thunderbolt 2 is much slower than that, say around 2 gigabytes/sec.

The impact of this may vary based on how many GPU calls are executed per dataset. If you copy several gigabytes to VRAM, then execute many GPU calls on that dataset, that is less impacted by GPU<->CPU bandwidth than if you do a few GPU calls on repeatedly changing large VRAM datasets.

If The Wolfe remote GPU works, the question is how broadly useful is the performance? Does it only help a few games and benchmarks or would it greatly help a Mac laptop running Premiere, After Effects, Lightroom, FCPX or Motion? And would it be stable under high stress and diverse workloads for extended periods?