The high-end version of BlackMagic’s external GPU for Mac computers has been officially discontinued now that AMD recently dropped its Radeon RX Vega 56 graphics chip.
“The GPU chip has been discontinued so we can no longer build the Blackmagic eGPU Pros,” a spokesperson for Blackmagic told Cult of Mac. The publication asked Blackmagic whether the product might return with a new GPU, but didn’t get a response to that question.
The product was removed from the online Apple store. The more affordable $699 eGPU from BlackMagic continues to be available for the time being, but it’s currently out of the stock.
External GPUs are supported on Thunderbolt 3-equipped Mac systems running macOS High Sierra 10.13.4 or later, but they also work with non-Apple computers that use the Thunderbolt 3 protocol. An eGPU allows your computer to access additional graphics performance provided by an external graphics processor. On macOS, eGPUs just work without any special setup.
The phased-out $1,199 eGPU had AMD’s RX Vega 56 graphics chip with 8GB of video memory. It featured a DisplayPort connection supporting 5K screens, a base clock speed of 1,156MHz and 56 compute units that offered similar performance to the Vega GPU in the iMac Pro.