Apple announced external GPU support at last year’s WWDC, finally rolling out support for the feature back in March. Since then, a handful of manufacturers have brought Thunderbolt 3 functionality to their units, including, notably, Razer back in March.
Alongside the release of new MacBook Pros, the company has taken an extra step toward embracing the tech by giving its seal of approval to a new system from Blackmagic — the simply named Blackmagic eGPU. The company does these kinds of partnerships from time to time — the LG UltraFine 5K Display being perhaps the most notable example.
The $699 accessory features an AMD Radeon Pro 580 graphics card and 8GB of DDR5 RAM in a fairly small footprint. There’s an HDMI port, four USB 3.1s and three Thunderbolt 3s, the latter of which makes it unique among these peripherals. The company says the on-board cooling system operates pretty quietly, which should fit nicely alongside those new, quieter MacBook keyboards.
Many developers will no doubt prefer to configure their own, but for those who want an easier solution for playing resource-intensive games or graphics rendering on with a MacBook, this is a fairly simple solution. The eGPU is available now through Apple’s retail channels.