eGPU for VR flight simming on 2020 MacBook Pro 16"

pengjn · 5 Sep 2020 at 08:14

After several years of poor health and finances...I'm back!!!

IIRC the last rig I built, with solid advice from all you guys, was built around an EVGA hybrid 1080 Ti, which was a nice beast that I built for VR when the first Oculus Rift came out. I had to give up flying gliders 4 years ago due to having to take meds and I want to get back to flying, if only virtually. I'm completely behind on performance computing tech, so please bear with me. What I'm proposing is something that you guys are probably, quite understandably cos I love building specialised rigs too, so try not to be sick/punch me for my plan...

I've just bought a 2020 MacBook Pro 16" for work and it's powered by:
- 2.3GHz 8‑core Intel Core i9, Turbo Boost up to 4.8GHz, with 16MB shared L3 cache
- AMD Radeon Pro 5500M with 4GB of GDDR6 memory and automatic graphics switching Intel UHD Graphics 630

I've tested it using Microsoft Flight Sim 2020 on medium settings, on my crappy 23" £100 work monitor (1080p IIRC?), and the frame rate is playable. I didn't know about the concept of eGPUs until last week and i didn't know about the new NVIDIA RTX 30XX range, which look frickin amazing (60m transisitors per sqmm!!?!?!?). My questions are:

1) Is MS Flight Sim 2020 CPU or GPU bound?
2) Would an eGPU powered by an RTX 3070 supercharge my MBP or would there be bottlenecks all over the show, which would mean I'd be getting little benefit from the GFX card?
3) Same question as 2) but am i likely to be able to power the latest generation of VR headsets.
4) Any recommendations on which brand of 3070 is considered to be the performance/value leader?

mmmm - the more I write this the more I think I should take the chassis from my old rig and build a new one around an RTX 3070? However, *ideally* i'd supercharge my MBP with a RTX 3070 eGPU because I don't want to take up space with a new rig if I can avoid it.

Thanks everyone!! Jimbo

pengjn · 5 Sep 2020 at 08:24

Maybe I should've googled this first... :-] Looks like it's highly CPU bound, so I might shelf my plan and stick with my MBP for the time being

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Micro...FPS-at-FHD-on-high-end-hardware.489254.0.html

KompuKare · 5 Sep 2020 at 09:10

Yes, don't know that much about it having just glanced at reviews but I was going to respond that is heavily CPU bound, heavily GPU bound, requires tons of disk space, fast storage etc.
Probably can actually take advantage of PCIe 4.0
I haven't seen any benches on Ryzen with PCIe 3.0 vs 4.0.
Currently not performing as expected with Radeon but once we get actual benches of RTX3000 and/or Radeon performance gets sorted out, I'dexpect to see a differences there as it seems to stream assets all the time.
Actually wonder if the 8GB of the RTX 3070 is enough, or even the 10GB of the 3080. This might actually run best on the 3090 but £1.5k just for the card.
Tons of system memory might make a differences too depending on how clever it and/or Windows is at caching stuff.

pengjn · 5 Sep 2020 at 11:10

Thank you bigley for the reply, much appreciated! That all makes perfect sense. I watched a couple of YouTubes and apparently you need a beast rig. However... a good point was made; frame is much less important in flight sims than in first person shooters (annoying how those acronyms are the same)

Combat squirrel · 13 Sep 2020 at 18:23

Its highly GPU bound FS 2020 - however as you say it also taxes the rest of the system greatly, but right now, its the GPU - get yourself a 3080 and see how you go - its abit of a pain to setup an EGPU Nvidia and boot into windows bootcamp and it all run well - will take some tweaking, but it CAN be done, OR id suggest just building a fast high end gaming PC which will allow the 3080 to flex its muscles more and not be PCIE bandwidth limited - as to how much a 4x 3.0 slot/connection slows it down, I don't know, but id be interested in seeing some results.

I currently game on my Mac mini in windows boot camp with Vega 56 and it does a great job to be honest, plays everything I want well, but iv not got flight sim which really is the only current 'next gen' game.