Do You Think Framework Ever Make Graphics Expansion Modules For The 13/13Pro Model???
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I think it’s extremely unlikely. The entire chassis, cooling solution, and the mainboard arrangement would have to be totally redesigned. They only just announced the 13 Pro, and it would require another, entirely new revamp to make it work with any kind of graphics module, and it wouldn’t be backwards compatible. It would basically be an entirely new machine.
Possibly more likely is that they make an external GPU that works on any of their machines with fast enough USB-C ports. Even that is probably unlikely, but who knows what they’re working on.
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Are there even worthwhile dgpus in that form factor/power envelope?
The industry seems to be moving to stronger igpus for that power envelope instead. The igpu on the new pantherlake chip should be quite formidable and I hope strix halos successor will support some form of camm and fit on a framework mainboard.
USB4 egpus allready work quite well with existing offerings but that’s obviously not the same as having something integrated.
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Because the FW13 doesn’t have an expansion bay (the big thing in the back of the FW16), any internal DGPU on a FW13 would have to either be soldered to the motherboard (at which point it might as well be an iGPU), or fit in an expansion card (the USB ports). I can’t think of a dGPU that would be low enough power that a sufficiently good heat sink could live in an expansion card.
I think it would be more likely that the FW13 continues to support PCIe forwarding through USB C, and hopefully Linux eventually is able to cope with GPUs crashing or being disconnected (as would be necessary to deal with hot unplugging of an external GPU, such as you might find in a USB C dock).
That works quite well at this point, at least with (gcn3+) amd cards, nvidia is a whole other can of worms. I can hotplug my egpu in, launch a game on int and yank the egpu and all that crashes is the game. The I can plug it in again, launch te game on it again and all is well. The first half or that has worked for a while, the second one is somewhat more recent.
That’s great to hear for AMD gpus! Unfortunately, I only currently own an “old but gold” NVIDIA gpu, so I’m unsure that the drivers relevant to my existing hardware can or even will handle hotplugging.
Doing so would likely require Linux to drastically improve recovery if the GPU driver itself crashes.
Yeah the nvidia drivers for especially “old but gold” nvidia hardware is a lot rougher.
Newer stuff is a lot more linux friendly as with all the ai stuff that the bulk of nvidias output goes to is running on linux. Still nowhere near as fully open source as the amd stuff though unfortunately.
Not planning on getting an nvidia card new enough to test the new drivers anytime soon myself though.
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I also believe this to be unlikely because the form factor doesn’t suit that use case well and with available main boards featuring the Intel Ultra X7 358H / X9 388H with ARC B390 iGPU, you can game on a Framework 13 quite reasonably well for what it is.
There is always the option to get a 3rd party external thunderbolt dock for a desktop GPU or get the Framework 16 which is better suited to GPU related tasks like gaming.