FCP doesn't utilize eGPU

Hey everyone, first post here so be gentle if I'm doing this wrong. Basically what the title says: For whatever reason, FCP seems to not be utilizing my eGPU.

Equipment: I'm on a top tier 2018 MacBook Pro 13" Touch Bar and a Razor Core X with a Radeon RX 5700 XT hooked up to it, running FCP 10.6 on Big Sur.

The issue: After a bit of a hiatus from editing, I sat down to work on a project and trying to play back 4K material is extremely sluggish, even on the "better performance" setting. Editing and playing back in 4K shot with the same camera worked swimmingly for me before, so I opened up Activity Monitor while playing the timeline and the 5700 XT isn't being used at all. Please see the attached screenshot.

Troubleshooting: I have checked the box within FCP preferences to use the external GPU, I have tried rebooting, I have tried plugging the eGPU into different TB3 ports on the Mac - nothing seems to make a difference.

Anyone have any ideas here? Or am I missing something really basic?
Thanks in advance!

10.6 is pretty sluggish for just about everybody. Use feedback to report your specific issue.

I just updated to 10.6 on Monterey and I'm experiencing EXTREME sluggishness... specifically, loading libraries, preparing file for exports are just hanging for a good minute before it decides that it will export.. i've got a project with about 300 individual clips on a timeline to export and it's incredibly tedious.. i've trashed render files and prefs but it's almost unusable.. (

Seems optimizing it for M1 chips ruined it for Intel chips. Thanks Apple! Seeing how the overwhelming majority of us won't have M1 chip Macs for quite some time!

I'm on Big Sur, not as bad as I read Monterey is, but still, issues, bugs, huge disappointment.

JoeEditor wrote:

Seems optimizing it for M1 chips ruined it for Intel chips. Thanks Apple! Seeing how the overwhelming majority of us won't have M1 chip Macs for quite some time!

I'm on Big Sur, not as bad as I read Monterey is, but still, issues, bugs, huge disappointment.

This is NOT good! And in the absence of a 27” M1X capable iMac, they (Apple) have royally bent us over.. i hope a firmware update can right the situation.  

No consolation, but the situation is not any better on the M1 Macs. Nice to see Bill Davis’ machine crash at the FCP summit. 

I didn't attend that specific session, had paying work to take care of at the time, but I heard that Apple's own demo FCP crashed a new Mac. Very funny! Someone drinking the cool-aid tell me again how FCP never crashes and Resolve and PPro crash non-stop?

You didn't miss anything. It was just a demo, and Steve and Mark do it better.

I've just installed 10.6.1 and it appears to have resolved my library load and export issues... Audio waveform refresh also appears to be much quicker..