“Connected to my LG UltraWide 5K2K Display, the MacBook Air averages around 1-2 frames per second in Rocket League, and similarly abysmal scores in Unigine Heaven and Valley benchmarks.” I’ve been so close over the last couple of weeks to going ahead with a MacBook Air M1 purchase to replace this overheating monster of a laptop, but part of me just wants to stay the course and get a couple more years use out of it.“On its own, the 2018 MacBook Air is a downright terrible gaming machine,” Jeff Benjamin writes for 9to5Mac.

(Which, I’m well aware, makes me a great candidate for the M1. Honestly, if it didn’t cook my system, I’d just run on the internal GPU all the time, regardless of the degraded performance. This left me with a bad taste in my mouth for the clunkiness that is an eGPU. (Anecdotally, my system crashes stopped when I switched to a shorter TB cable.) If your Thunderbolt cable or OS implementation isn’t perfect, you’ll see system crashes frequently, not to mention if your cable gets yanked. This puts your system at all sorts of stability risks, which I’ve personally seen. You’re taking a core system component like the GPU and stringing it outside of your machine.

However, like you said, it just hasn’t panned out, and it reminds me of other neato ideas over the years there were technical feats but were in retrospect kinda dumb (dual video cards, dual dial-up modems–yes that was a thing for a hot 5 minutes in the '90s). It seems like a gimmick of the time when we were awed by the bandwidth and external bus capabilities of Thunderbolt 3, and thought it would be amazing to have a full-powered GPU on a lightweight mobile device. When I do it over (in a couple of years when this system is needing replaced), I have no interest in the eGPU route. Remember how 5 years ago there was all this hype and excitement over eGPU options for laptops by Razer, Dell, Apple, etc? It didn’t just stagnate and disappear for no reason.Īs the owner of the Blackmagic eGPU Pro with a MacBook Pro 2018, I firmly agree with your assessment. In a lot of ways it was like SLI setups where the in-theory concept was fine but actual use-cases turned out to be rather limited. The industry tried the eGPU route and… it hasn’t really panned out.

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