Mac Metal vs Archicad openGL

[Anonymous]

Help?
Mac Metal vs Archicad openGL
on a mac 16” 2020 macBook pro with 8GB GPU Metal, do I need an eGPU with openGL and 16GB to get the best Mac/Archicad 23-24 performance?

Graphisoft Hardware for Archicad 23 and 24
Recommended hardware: https://graphisoft.com/support/system_requirements/AC23/

Graphics card: Dedicated OpenGL 4.0 compatible graphics card is recommended to fully exploit hardware acceleration capabilities. 2 GB+ VRAM is recommended, opt for 4 GB+ with 4K displays. You can find a list of recommended graphics cards at: http://www.graphisoft.com/videocards

Mac Computers use Metal
Metal combines functions similar to OpenGL and OpenCL under one API. It is intended to improve performance by offering low-level access to the GPU hardware for apps on iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and tvOS. It can be compared to low-level APIs on other platforms such as Vulkan and DirectX 12.

Nowhere could I find on Graphisoft’s’ website’s the mention of “Metal”

Graphisoft recommended eGPU’s:
Recommended Graphics Cards for ARCHICAD 23 mac

OpenGL compatible graphics card with on-board memory of 1024 MB or more is recommended to fully exploit hardware acceleration capabilities. Since Macs are offered with a graphics card (with one optional choice at some series), and the drivers are bundled with system updates, we cannot recommend a specific card or driver. MacOS's graphic engine, Quartz does not allow an application to access graphics card functions directly, which minimizes the possibility of application-specific display problems. On Mac there are no third-party drivers, and the drivers that Apple builds into the Operating System are very thoroughly tested for OpenGL compatibility, since the Quartz graphic engine itself is based on OpenGL with OpenCL support. This means a big difference between the Mac and the PC platforms, where are hundreds of different graphics cards available. You can be confident that all of the current Macs come with a graphics card that is compatible with ARCHICAD. For the best performance, choose Mac computers with dedicated graphics cards.

“Integrated Intel Iris and Intel HD cards work with ARCHICAD, but their performance can be quite limited.”

Mac Compatable eGPU’s:
(Note not all mac compatable-eGPU’s are openGL)

AMD Radeon RX 470, RX 480, RX 570, RX 580, and Radeon Pro WX 7100
AMD Radeon RX Vega 56, Sapphire Vega 56.
AMD Radeon RX Vega 64, Vega Frontier Edition Air, and Radeon Pro WX 9100
AMD Radeon RX 5700, 5700 XT, and 5700 XT 50th Anniversary

[Karl Ottenstein]

You should not have any problem with the 16" Macbook Pro with the 8GB graphics option. Definitely get 16 to 32 GB RAM and at least 1 TB SSD.

The recommendations for AC 24 are here, by the way:

https://graphisoft.com/resources-and-support/system-requirements

There's certainly no reason to even consider an eGPU until you find that you can't live without one 🙂

(I have not seen a definitive statement from Graphisoft concerning the switch to Metal. The existing code runs fine on Macs though.)