FCPX 10.4.7. egpu problem

Hi Luis,

I decided to consolidate my experience with the Metal-capable FCPX in this post.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/250996384

Relevant to this discussion but not about highlight a problem.

Any idea where all of todays posts have gone?

What was said (in the post from Interceptor121 to my post - which have been deleted with others) all makes sense. However the i9 MBP16 was beaten by the Mac Mini i7. I tried this a few times and it was either very very close or beaten.

Re the upload, from what I can see all the 'hard' work is done until the process reaches 50% then it seems to switch to upload, is this correct? My upload speed is consistently 20Mbit and the 2 Macs were never running uploads at the same time, so were not contending for speed.

The MBP had a 5500m with 4Gb ram (so the mid spec - or high Apple store spec) so middle of the road in the lineup of MBP16's, overall though I have found the system somewhat underwhelming.

I have uploaded a video of my setup running a render then upload below. It shows a render first then render/share to Youtube. The render works well with the eGPU the share does not.

The advice on exporting to h264 then uploading directly to Youtube is useful, can this be automated with compressor if it takes better advantage of the eGPU? and I presume the set-eGPU.sh script is now defunct for Catalina?

https://youtu.be/cXU4pkyY5l4

The posts have been deleted by the bot that manages the forum as there were a number if inappropriate ones nested with good ones so it clears it up

I didn’t know the mbp was middle of the road and likely the timeline was not rendered but probably you have seen even with 4 GB it was not too far off the mini with eGPU with 8 GB vram.

the script eGPU.sh didn’t do anything else than go into all your app and set the prefer external eGPU flag

regarding YouTube it is bizarre that the path share to you tube and h264 produce different results. However if you notice in the export to YouTube there is a choice of better quality or speed in H264 there isn’t (I presume because is using hardware acceleration) and compressor may do something different in turn

Looks like Apple does read these posts. Guess they’re not too happy that one can use an external GPU to upgrade an older product, instead of buying an over-prices machine every year... looks like I’ll be migrating to Resolve if they’re not going to give us the option to properly run an external gpu with FCPX.

Sorry I'm not explaining myself well.

There are 3 general MBP 16" specs CPU/graphics wise.

1) i7 with 5300m with 4Gb vram - Available at any apple store

2) i9 with 5500m with 4Gb vram - Available at any apple store

3) i9 with 5500m with 8Gb vram - BTO

The GPU can be had on either CPU but to keep things simple I have not shown every permutation, the rest of which are all BTO.

I have tried both item 1 and 2 (both of the readily available shop specifications) and can confirm that the Mac Mini was either very close or was better than the Macbook Pro. Again just to confirm this was a Mac Mini i7 3.2 with 32Gb RAM and NO eGPU, just the UHD 630 integrated graphics.

So I'm a little perplexed as to why both the eGPU platform is so useless now and why my Mac Mini is competitive with an i9 MBP with the 5500m graphics.

On a separate note I thought I would give Davinci Resolve a look. I'm not keen on the interface (I've just learned FCPX) but also DR appears to have a broken export to Youtube so that doesn't work either! Who knew this was going to be so difficult getting video's to Youtube. Probably should just stick with iMovie :-)

Many thanks, I'll take a look at that video. I'm just looking for the best possible upload speed and a trade off with quality (which I am happy with at present).

I will definitely do more digging following what you have said, as I'm just learning I don't necessarily know all the nuances, but I'm learning.

Thanks for your time and support!

Can you imagine how happy he'll be if/when Apple (ever) remedy the issue we've experienced? He's not used it for export in FCPX (you can't miss what you never had/experienced) and only tested "Capture One" in a before/after scenario.

Guys guys, i figured this out, relax. It was very simple fix actually.

First i threw my 3 year old Imac, my eGPU enclosure and Vega 64 in the trash. It was all worth 7000 but eh whatever. Then i bought a fully maxed out MacPro and guess what? Problem fixed.

What has that to do with eGPU? Any software upgrade comes with problems which is the point am trying to make here

In essence nobody has given any contribution to actually improve the situation and find out what is really going on

So you just found out you probably had FCPX preferences corrupted and the software works fine after months of swearing at apple on this thread

Activity monitor is not an indicator of performance and now you know it too

Well done!

Stop reporting my posts. Stop trolling me.

This isn’t a corruption that appears on all of my macs and those of many hundreds of others.

Its a bug. Be gracious and accept you were wrong and that someone managed to figure out a workaround while still waiting for apple to fix their errors.

You are wrong, my stopwatch says otherwise.

When the egpu works as it is intended then my renders take about 5 mins. When the egpu is not working they take 30+ mins on a mac mini and 13" mbp.

It 10.4.6 they were 5 mins (Because the egpu was doing the work) 10.4.7. the egpu wasn't working. In 10.4.8 using my export/share method, my renders are back in the 5 minute range.

You can't argue with a stopwatch and actual time to render a project, no matter how much you try, you are just wrong.....Accept this and move on!

I have reported and responded to a real issue that I and many others have experienced.

I have provided a work-around that means that my egpu is doing what it was supposed to do (and why I purchased it). My projects take 30+ mins on the mac mini to render but only 5 when using the egpu THOSE ARE THE FACTS! TIME IS MONEY! This has also, as other posts confirm, worked for others!

My videos now take the same time as they did to render/share/export as they did in 10.4.6, that is ALL THAT MATTERS.

Why do you persist in arguing when it's not an issue you've experienced or have any first hand knowledge of???

WOW, that's mad.....

I did wonder how my existing projects would work on a Pro with single/multiple internal GPU's, they're faster than the Mac Mini on the 16" MPB (16 mins) but not as fast as the Mac Mini was under 10.4.6 with the Vega 64 EGPU (5 mins).

Great info!

Basically any time of you go outside the approved configurations you are on your own and if you disregard the compatibility list run into problems because Apple is not testing all possible permutations

am not surprised when I log problems they even check if am using an original apple cable