Hi all,

Hope you’re all doing well! 

I run P3D on my iMac with boot camp (yes I know 😞 but I can’t change it) 

My GPU is the thing that’s affecting my performance the worst as the processor and memory are still within range at by current settings  

i am thinking of getting an external GPU, which sold have a Radeon RX Vega 56 with 8gb of HBM2 memory which is compatible with Mac and is double the gpu memory of what I currently have

my question is would I see any performance improvement with this external gpu? 

My Specs are 

3.0GHz 6-core Intel Core i5 with Turbo Boost up to 4.1GHz

RAM: 8GB

Radeon Pro 570X with 4GB of GDDR5 memory

 1TB Fusion Drive

Thanks guys! 

I'm not an iMac specialist. Are you going to use a breakaway box to connect the external gpu (for power) ? Seems like a lot of money for little performance gain.

I once had the same idea, but ultimately decided not to do it because of the prohibitive cost of an external GPU. The fact is that the external GPU with box will probably clock in over 600$, and the connection will be suboptimal because the best you can do with the external GPU is likely a Thunderbolt 3.0 connection (check what connector you have in your computer, though!). Eventually I just built a separate system that was in every way more powerful than what my Mac could possibly be. I ended up spending some 1800$ total, but this is in part due to the crazy prices of SSDs at the time. These days you could probably get the same build for ~1500$, I guess. You'd have a good graphics card connected through PCIe (for perhaps half the price!!), an overclockable CPU, more RAM, more hard drive space that would work considerably faster than a fusion drive... I really would seriously consider building a separate rig in your position. If you don't have the money, better to save it and build a new rig later when you cna afford it, rather than buying an external GPU now.

P3d is more processor hungry than graphics card. I don't think a graphics card upgrade is going to help you much because you're still going to have a CPU bottleneck caused by that relatively slow, old processor. Were I in your shoes, I'd take the (crazy steep) price of the external GPU, and put it into a savings account. Get it up to around $1500 and then build a PC geared toward flight sim's requirements.

At this point you should also bear in mind that if you have any interest in FS2020, it's likely that it will benefit more from a better graphics card (though will still almost certainly need a high-power CPU as well). If you think you might switch over when it releases, it's not a terrible idea to wait to do any hardware upgrades until we know more about what that sim will best benefit from.