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External GPU card for 2012 Mac Mini possible with TB->PCIe chassis?


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I have a 2012 Mac Mini and need better rendering performance than the integrated GPU can offer.

Has anyone seen or heard of a Thunderbolt-->PCIe expansion chassis with a suitable graphics card installed that will be supported & recognized by Vectorworks?

I'd rather not have to move to an iMac (doesn't work with my standing desk setup) or a Mac Pro (too expensive.)

Thanks.

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

It CAN be done but its not standard yet. I haven't tested such a setup personally yet.

On Mac it would be a little harder, since you can't manually install your own drivers really, I would guess you'd have to select a card supported by existing drivers mainly.

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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee

Also, I haven't seen it done natively in Mac OS so far, most of the examples i've seen they had been bootcamped to Windows. On Windows you could just install whatever driver you needed, I suspect driver issues (in addition to extreme cost) is why we havent seen more Mac setups with this.

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  • 1 year later...

Updating this thread w/ useful info:

I am now running an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970, in an external PCIe <--> Thunderbolt2 box, connected to the Mac Mini's single Thunderbolt port. Setup is running natively in OS X 10.10.5, no Bootcamp / Windows. (But reports indicate it can also work in those modes, w/ some caveats.) This solution works with most *any* Mac with a Thunderbolt port.

300% OpenGL performance increase, makes a big difference for using Vectorworks in Wireframe & OpenGL render modes. (But not other modes -- those are the only 2 that benefit heavily from GPU performance as of this writing. Polygon, hidden-line, and of course Renderworks are still heavily CPU-bound.)

In VW2016 the amount of detail, esp. including textures, anti-aliasing, edges, and shadows that the OpenGL mode can display is impressive, and since OpenGL is sped-up by the GPU there is a big difference when handling complex models.

You can read about the details of my install at the TechInferno forums, where I gathered info before buying my own equipment.

This cost about $670 and around 10-15 hours of research & setup time. You could get the same setup, pre-built, for about $1000 from http://www.bizon-tech.com. Caveat emptor, BizonTech is a small / unknown company, basically all they are doing is re-packaging the same parts I listed in my post above and making a few cosmetic improvments.

Edited by Gilbert Osmond
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  • Vectorworks, Inc Employee
Updating this thread w/ useful info:

I am now running an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970, in an external PCIe <--> Thunderbolt2 box, connected to the Mac Mini's single Thunderbolt port. Setup is running natively in OS X 10.10.5, no Bootcamp / Windows. (But reports indicate it can also work in those modes, w/ some caveats.) This solution works with most *any* Mac with a Thunderbolt port.

300% OpenGL performance increase, makes a big difference for using Vectorworks in Wireframe & OpenGL render modes. (But not other modes -- those are the only 2 that benefit heavily from GPU performance as of this writing. Polygon, hidden-line, and of course Renderworks are still heavily CPU-bound.)

In VW2016 the amount of detail, esp. including textures, anti-aliasing, edges, and shadows that the OpenGL mode can display is impressive, and since OpenGL is sped-up by the GPU there is a big difference when handling complex models.

You can read about the details of my install at the TechInferno forums, where I gathered info before buying my own equipment.

This cost about $670 and around 10-15 hours of research & setup time. You could get the same setup, pre-built, for about $1000 from http://www.bizon-tech.com. Caveat emptor, BizonTech is a small / unknown company, basically all they are doing is re-packaging the same parts I listed in my post above and making a few cosmetic improvments.

This is fantastic to see. I love when I get to see users cleverly tinker.

I have a multi-day meeting I'm leaving for this afternoon, when I get back I'm going to set aside time to drool over this.

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  • 10 months later...

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