The upcoming macOS High Sierra obviates the need for this kind of check.Earlier this week Razer, best known for its PC Laptops and gaming-related peripherals, introduced a new eGPU solution called the Razer Core X. That’s not technically linked to the Metal 2 API at all, and conflating the two just confuses people. What users appear to be referring to here is the previous need to patch the OS kernel to allow an eGPU to function properly in a Mac system (as previously discussed at 9to5 Mac). But as far as Thunderbolt 3 is concerned, the idea that you need a new API to support it is incorrect. To the OS, when you plug in a Thunderbolt device, you’re hooking it up via PCI Express (the exact version of PCIe depends on the version of Thunderbolt you’re using and the controller chip used to connect the ports to the rest of the system).ĪMD, Intel, and Razer did some custom work to create an external graphics platform that would be easier to standardize, and a set of UEFI extensions to make it work more reliably and with fewer hoops for end-users to jump through.

The entire point of Thunderbolt 3 is to extend the PCI Express bus in a way that’s essentially transparent to the operating system.

This last is an odd turn of phrase, however, despite having been picked up by multiple websites. Metal 2 has also been credited with adding support for external graphics arrays, which appear to be based on AMD’s XConnect technology and run via Thunderbolt 3. The company’s new Metal 2 API, the successor to its Metal API, and is supposedly up to 10x faster than its predecessor, and will be included in its High Sierra macOS update. Yesterday, at WWDC, the Cupertino company announced several new initiatives and products that should make VR on Macs far more plausible, as well as drive higher Mac gaming performance in general. But it is working to offer better GPU performance overall to its customers, and hopping on the VR bandwagon as well. Apple may not be doing much to close the gap in absolute terms, since the GPU hardware in its brand-new iMac Pro will likely be quite expensive. While there have been a handful of exceptions over the years - often only when major GPU refresh cycles happened to precisely coincide with Mac refresh cycles - the GPU performance available in a Mac has vastly lagged what you can buy in a PC. For most of Apple’s existence, gaming on the Mac has meant second-rate performance, particularly for the dollar.

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