While many people pay attention to the speed of their computer’s CPU (central processing unit) and how much RAM (random-access memory) their applications need, the video card (also called the graphics card) is getting more attention as image-editing, video-editing, and game applications increasingly rely on it. As it turns out, it is compatible with both the Mac mini and the Microsoft Surface Pro 4, all it needs is a USB 3 port and away it goes. Dell D3100 USB Hub Compatibility: Windows 10 and Mac OS I took a chance with the D3100, as at the time the official Dell documentation for the hub listed Dell hardware only as compatible.Macs using Apple Silicon processors work differently, and that is not covered here. ( Note: This article covers how graphics hardware works on Macs using Intel processors. I have a Mid 2011 Mac Mini and I used the DosDude Catalina patcher to.The Samsung T7 SSD has Read speeds up to 1,050 MB/s / and write speeds up to 1,000 MB/s on your M1 Mac mini, which is almost ten times faster than standard hard drives making your image and video editing workflows much faster and tasks like app and game development significantly more efficient even with the 8GB variant of the M1 Mac mini thanks. All of these changes add to the work that a video card has to do.3rd party video players on iOS (and to a lesser extent on macOS) support AirPlay.The power of the GPU has helped make it possible for affordable computers to smoothly edit HD video, high-resolution stills, and 3D graphics and animation. In a desktop computer, the GPU and VRAM are often on a completely separate card that can be easily replaced.Today’s video cards are so powerful that many applications now use the GPU to get through photo and video processing and effects faster, which also frees up the CPU to process other things at the same time. This design allows more powerful GPUs to be used, and with more VRAM. On high-end computers the CPU and GPU are separate chipsets, each with their own memory this is called discrete graphics or dedicated graphics. Any memory needed for graphics is taken from the main system RAM ( see details about VRAM amounts on Macs with integrated video).
Using Mini For Video Editing Mac OS I TookIf I disconnect the eGPU, the bottom graph goes away and the Intel Iris Plus graph becomes very busy instead.Starting with iStat Menus 3.1.6, you can see graphics usage in the CPU & GPU menu. The integrated graphics aren’t being used because the discrete graphics card is so much faster and more powerful. In the example below, the top shows the internal integrated graphics of my 13″ MacBook Pro, and the bottom displays the discrete graphics card in an eGPU connected using Thunderbolt 3, while using GPU-accelerated features in Adobe software. How can you measure graphics hardware usage on a Mac?Activity Monitor, the standard macOS utility for monitoring the system, recently added a GPU tab so you can see which applications are using the graphics hardware the most.In addition, you can choose Window > GPU History to see a graph of GPU usage over time. Earlier versions of Photoshop limited GPU acceleration to document navigation (such as smoothly panning and zooming very large documents) and 3D, but Photoshop versions starting with CS6 now uses the GPU to speed up additional features such as Liquify. But if the VRAM usage is consistently near 100%, your Mac might run GPU-accelerated applications faster if you switch to a video card with more VRAM.Some of the general factors that can increase VRAM usage are: For example, my 2011 15″ MacBook Pro has both Intel HD Graphics 3000 (integrated with the CPU) and an AMD Radeon HD 6750M (discrete GPU), and in the figure below you can see that the discrete Radeon is currently active because at least one running application, such as Photoshop, caused discrete graphics to activate.You can watch a graphics hardware utility as you use different applications or change your monitor settings. If the amount of VRAM in use is always well below 100% then your current video card is fine. It has a bar graph of the amount of VRAM being used and it names the graphics in use. Thinkorswim download for macHigher pixel density. Retina/HiDPI displays, including 4K/5K desktop displays, pack many more pixels into each square inch than a traditional display. I believe that adding Spaces (macOS virtual desktops) has a similar effect on VRAM as adding displays. Connecting an external monitor will use more VRAM because you increase the number of pixels to update. It takes more graphics card memory to display more pixels. GPU-accelerated features. For example, if you use the 3D features in Photoshop or Adobe After Effects, the VRAM and 3D capabilities of your card matter more than if you only edit 2D images. Applications with 3D features commonly have them handled by the GPU and its VRAM. The more graphics documents you have open, the more video RAM it takes to manipulate them. Larger documents and multiple documents. In that type of Mac the video card is in a standard expansion slot so it can be easily replaced with a better one. Can you add more VRAM to a Mac?The ability to increase the VRAM for your Mac depends on whether it has discrete graphics, integrated graphics, or a Thunderbolt 3 port.On Macs with discrete graphics, the only model that makes it possible to upgrade the amount of discrete VRAM built in is the Mac Pro tower desktop. Also, some recent MacBook Pros have two sets of graphics hardware that they automatically switch between: integrated graphics (the GPU is part of the CPU) for optimal battery life, and a dedicated video card with its own additional VRAM that kicks in when a specific application needs high-performance graphics.As of 2020, more applications are adding or improving their support for GPU acceleration, so for applications that are important to you, check their system requirements with each upgrade to see if GPU acceleration might make more of a difference. Features like these often need a specific GPU and a minimum amount of VRAM to achieve the speed boost, so check their graphics card requirements to make sure that the card in your computer qualifies.Given those general guidelines, keep in mind that it’s possible for two Macs with the same specifications to have very different VRAM usage patterns if different features, document sizes, and display resolutions are used. When a computer has integrated graphics it’s harder to tell how much VRAM it can use, partly because the graphics hardware doesn’t have its own memory. How do you know how much VRAM is available for Macs with integrated graphics?(I added this info in June 2013) When a computer has discrete graphics, the amount of VRAM it has is fixed and usually clearly stated. But how it works depends on which Mac you have and which version of OS X it’s running, and to learn about that you want to read the next section. This is called an eGPU, or external graphics processing unit, and it becomes a way to add more VRAM to the Mac by using whatever amount of VRAM is on that external graphics card.On Macs with integrated graphics, because graphics hardware uses the same RAM as the system it may be possible to increase VRAM by adding more system RAM.
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