Any experiences with eGPUs?

[AlexP]

Im considering a 4090 as an external gpu to my laptop - using something like that Razer device.
Anyone have any experience using external GPUs for rendering etc? and have any insights?

Thanks

[Luma3d]

Just bought one. RAZOR CORE X...I have a 3090 in it. Definitely fixed my vram issue that I was running into with my msi rtx 3080 laptop. Not sure if the new cards will fit. They seem too thick.

[AlexP]

Just bought one. RAZOR CORE X...I have a 3090 in it. Definitely fixed my vram issue that I was running into with my msi rtx 3080 laptop. Not sure if the new cards will fit. They seem too thick.

How have you found the performance? and are you able to use both the external one and the internal one at the same time?

[glorybound]

Following! You'll be lucky to have a 50% return on an external card (which is what I have read).

[Luma3d]

Performance...rendering times, seems the same for my animations, but plenty of vram to render larger resolution. You are only able to use one card with Vantage, which is a bummer.

[AlexP]

Following! You'll be lucky to have a 50% return on an external card (which is what I have read).

Hmm really? that would suck

[AlexP]

Performance...rendering times, seems the same for my animations, but plenty of vram to render larger resolution. You are only able to use one card with Vantage, which is a bummer.

Same rendering times compared to your 3080?

[Muhammed_Hamed]

Following! You'll be lucky to have a 50% return on an external card (which is what I have read).

I get +90% scaling on a 3090 using Thunderbolt 3.0 and eGPU, using Razor Core X as well
It should be the same or better for you as your laptop is on Thunderbolt 4.0
The lower bandwidth on eGPU only affects uploading the scene data to VRAM, you might care about this if you render animation frames. But the actual rendering is near identical between a 3090 running native on PCIe vs eGPU
Setting this up was easy, but I don't have the same laptop as you. You may or may not run into trouble setting this up on your laptop(on the software side, which is solvable), I think it is worth investing in.. even using a 4090

To answer another question from your thread, there are eGPU boxes that could handle 4x 3090s. You can start with one and take it from there

best,
Muhammed

[Luma3d]

@Alex... yes. One this to keep in mind is that the egpu is loud. Not sure if it's the 3 fans on 3090 or the box. But...it's loud.

[AlexP]

Thanks for the input

[AlexP]

Just wanted to update this - I did buy a Razer Core X and a 3090 Founders card on secondary - I have to say I have been very impressed with the performance.
While the benchmark is lower than the office desktop 3090, the rendering performance feels to me as good if not better in some instances (possibly due to the egpu handling rendering only while the laptop 2060 handles everything else? speculating)

[glorybound]

Is the 12 GB ram enough for you? I have the 3080 and it also has 12GB of RAM. I can use it for gray scale renders, but anything else won't work.

[Luma3d]

Yep...makes a big difference...my 3080 built-in gpu just can't handle my Vantage files.

[AlexP]

Is the 12 GB ram enough for you? I have the 3080 and it also has 12GB of RAM. I can use it for gray scale renders, but anything else won't work.

The 3090 has 24gb which can handle 99% of the arch scenes I throw at it - typically interiors.

The only time I have had a problem was when I needed 4 rugs with vrayfur in the view - I had to render each separately and comp together. Having super hi-res textures also causes trouble ime - so I tend to resize any that are unnecessarily large.

But I have done scenes with heavy planting, hi-poly furniture etc and had no issues