The majority of the issues affecting PCI-E graphics cards in eGPU enclosures and the Mac Pro have been rectified by a macOS Monterey update released Thursday morning.
Fixes for external displays and Bluetooth connection are also included. On March 31, version 12.3.1 of macOS Monterey was released, including undocumented solutions to a problem affecting a limited number of users using third-party cards.
Video processing performance boosts were observed with PCI-E linked GPUs. Following the release of macOS Monterey 12.3, a number of customers encountered a fault that affected third-party GPU cards attached to a Mac through an external GPU enclosure, as well as those in Mac Pro setups.
According to one email from an AppleInsider reader, their Mac's integrated graphics processor outperformed the $2800 W6800X GPU that was connected. Another reader reported a 94% reduction in performance when using an unidentified AMD RDNA card inside the Mac Pro.
The problem, however, was not broad and did not affect every AMD card. It also had no effect on integrated graphics processors in iMac units or AMD MPX module cards.
Even with the card that looked to be the most afflicted, the Radeon 6800, the performance loss did not affect every application.
Early performance tests conducted by AppleInsider on various combinations of GPUs and eGPUs revealed conflicting effects on speed across different hardware configurations. Testing on Thursday afternoon, after the patch had been implemented, revealed that it was fully functional.
