Oh...now I'm impressed. How DID he do that?
It's not like he's cramming a hundred watts of power through there or something...it's still just a video signal. But I must not understand this thunderbolt thing.
Yea looks like he's using the thunderbolt cable to send/receive signals to/from the eGPU which effectively cuts his data throughput by half. This of course takes a performance hit when you look at this benchmarks where his frame rates can be 1.2-1.7x higher if he outputs the video onto an external monitor vs. using his laptops monitor.
Well the main point of this tech was to enable high end gaming on the laptop, so displaying on the laptop's screen is important.
High end gaming on a Mac, much less a Macbook Air, just makes me think "just because you CAN...doesn't mean that you SHOULD."
Why? The whole point of this tech is to game on computers that aren't traditionally seen as gaming rigs, i.e. a Macbook Air or a Windows ultrathin notebook.
This is like cramming a V8 into a Civic. It is now much faster, but you've screwed up everything that makes a Civic good to begin with, and it's still no sports car.
That's what people used to say about the Miata.This is like cramming a V8 into a Civic. It is now much faster, but you've screwed up everything that makes a Civic good to begin with, and it's still no sports car.
Um, no not at all.
This is like being able to own and use a nice, thin, quiet ultrabook laptop and then when you feel like sitting at a desk and doing some gaming, you plug in the video card and game away. No need to always have a 5+ pound 15" behemoth rig at all times.
That's what people used to say about the Miata.
Since Thunderbolt ports are not common in most PC laptops, I was wondering if this could work over USB 3.0 (5Gb/s).
Lame. The current MacBook air has an internal PCIe bus, which is what I was hoping he used. Show me the video of someone doing that. Thunderbolt adapters can be readily purchased online.
And no, USB 3.0 doesn't have the proper timing circuitry.
My laptop specs
Mid-2013 11" Macbook Air
1.7 GHz Intel Core i7-4650U (basically the most maxed out 11" mba)
8GB 1600 MHz DDR3
Intel HD Graphics 5000 1024 MB
512GB Apple SSD
Apple must be loading their legal ammunition now...
Intel even openly admits its bias against GPU usage where it's listed as unsupported in their Thunderbolt Certification Application. Talking to one of their thunderbolt guys, here's what that "Not Supported" means:
The “Not supported” means that Intel won’t neither certify your product nor deliver, at the moment, any Technology License for this kind of usage. As you know, this Technology License is required to develop a Thunderbolt device in the market and Certification is a must have to market any Thunderbolt product.
That's what people used to say about the Miata.