How can I change my render settings so I can use an eGPU to render?

Question

I just bought an external GPU thinking it would help with rendering images, and the viewport is definitely moving faster but I tried to render an image and I realized I'm still using the CPU to render. I'm fairly new to all this so this is all I can tell:

I'm working on a Macbook Pro version 12.1. The eGPU I'm using is a Sonnet Radeon RX 5500 XT. I wish to render with Cycles and I'm using version 2.93 of Blender. I thought I could just hook up the eGPU and it would appear as an option under the render settings, but that didn't happen. Then I looked at the System tab under Preferences and this is all I could see. Could someone please explain how to properly use this new eGPU to render scenes and animations?

Answer 1

Edit:

Since Blender 3.1 (March 9th 2022), Blender received support for Apple's Metal backend, allowing GPU rendering on:

• Apple M1 computers running macOS 12.2 or newer
• Apple computers with AMD graphics card running macOS 12.3 or newer

In the current version 4.2 released in July 16th 2024, the requirements for GPU rendering changed to macOS 13.0 or newer, with limitations.

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Short Answer: You can't (right now). In March, it will be ready. Long Answer: If you really want to do it and you have no patience, here are the steps.

Step 1: Go to https://beta.apple.com/sp/betaprogram and create an Apple Beta account. Download the latest beta of macOS Monterey 12.3 Beta 3. After the update is complete, proceed to step 2.

Step 2: Go to https://builder.blender.org/download/daily/ and download any version of EITHER Blender 3.2 Alpha or 3.1 Beta, as long as it is February 16th or newer. (I recommend just downloading the newest). After doing this. Open up Blender and in the preferences, it should show your GPU. I've the same model and it is working for me. After selecting the GPU, go into rendered view in Cycles with GPU compute selected. It will say it is loading render kernels, and that is okay. Depending on the hardware of your computer, wait 1-5 minutes and after the kernels load, it should be good.

Note: Kernels will have to load every time you download a new version of Blender and/or update your Mac. However, the kernels will not have to reload every time you go into rendered view, only if you update.

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

Well, it took forever to figure out but Macs don't support the gpu compute option for cycles. Also, because of this, the Cycles Render Devices tab won't appear.