Apple Approves AMD and Nvidia eGPU Drivers

Apple has approved external graphics drivers from both AMD and Nvidia, a change that matters to Mac owners who want to attach a dedicated GPU to their machine. The item comes from the show notes for episode 687 of The Accidental Tech Podcast, which also raised a listener idea, passed along by Jan Wedekind, about whether Apple could adopt modular GPU cards similar to the MPX modules used in the Mac Pro.

The hosts also ran the numbers on how much data a Thunderbolt 5 connection can move. The link carries 80 Gbit/s in each direction, or about 10 GB/s, and up to 120 Gbit/s one way when it is sending video to a display. A single PCIe 5.0 lane tops out at 32 Gbit/s, or 4 GB/s. A full 16-lane slot reaches 512 Gbit/s, or 64 GB/s. The Mac Pro's 64 lanes spread across its four slots add up to 2,048 Gbit/s, roughly 17 times Thunderbolt 5's single-direction ceiling.

Storage gets the same treatment. The show put a 2025 Mac Studio's internal drive at about 5.5 GB/s. The 4 TB SSD in the M5 Max MacBook Pro reads at roughly 13.6 GB/s and writes at about 17.8 GB/s. External options land lower: the OWC Envoy Ultra reaches about 5.1 GB/s for 8 TB at $2,250, and the OWC Thunderblade about 5.75 GB/s for $2,700. Both external drives sit well under what Thunderbolt 5 can carry, which suggests the enclosure and drive, not the cable, set the speed limit for these products.