Perhaps a different chassis would have helped.īut watching Lara Croft jump from snowy ledges and sneak through desert passages felt natural and fluid with the better graphics card (and better framerates). The Nvidia toolbar icon showed up, but the card itself never worked. I also tried using Nvidia’s web driver that’s partially designed with macOS in mind, thinking I’d hit on a way to make it work. The little processor icon didn’t show up. I plopped an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 into the eGPU chassis, connected it, booted, and nada.

If you’re wondering, I tried using Nvidia cards, but there’s no built-in driver support. Here you’ll find your gaming ambitions further thwarted by Apple’s lack of direct support for Nvidia cards. It makes some sense considering that AMD makes most of the graphics cards found in contemporary Macs, but it’s another low blow in a gaming environment where Nvidia cards win mountains of accolades. For those of you who can play with that kind of power, though, let’s move on to the supported cards. Unfortunately, that limitation likely knocks a lot of users out of the game right there. This is a bit of a bummer, but Thunderbolt 3 supports data transfers of up to 40Gbps, while Thunderbolt 2 supports 20Gbps. You can only pull this off without any technical trickery so long as you’re using a MacBook or iMac with Thunderbolt 3 support, which means you’re limited to using laptops dating from 2016 and iMacs dating from mid-2017.

It works, that is, so long as you have the right materials. It’s really no different from disconnecting a drive. Apple prides itself on elegant simplicity, and in this case Steve Jobs’ favorite old saying remains true: It just works. (Getting it to work with games takes a few more steps, but more on that later.) Even better, I didn’t even have to restart. Within seconds, an icon resembling a processor popped up on the Mac’s top menu bar, showing that the Radeon RX 580 was, in fact, working.

Once I slipped my Radeon RX 580 into an Akitio Node Pro chassis and tightened the screws, all I really needed to do was plug the Thunderbolt 3 cable into my MacBook Pro.

Can you do gaming on a mac book pro