David Hanak Apple last week started selling of the new Mac Pro and those for whom it is intended can happily order a machine that is unparalleled in Apple's offer. In addition to the "normally" available PC components, the novelty also includes a dedicated accelerator labeled Apple Afterburner, which can be added to the Mac Pro for an additional fee of 64 crowns. What can a special card from Apple specifically do and who is it worth?
You can have up to three Afterburner accelerators installed on your Mac Pro. They are used to accelerate Pro Res and Pro Res RAW videos, or in the editing process they can relieve the processor, which can then take care of other tasks. Currently, the Afterburner accelerator is supported by all Apple applications for processing video content, i.e. Final Cut Pro X, Motion, Compressor and QuickTime Player. In the future, editing programs from other manufacturers should also be able to use this card, but support depends only on them.
Apple Lossless Audio CODEC (ALAC), on your website generally describes what the card is for. It also shows where expansion cards should be installed, who they are suitable for, and how many it makes sense to put in a Mac Pro.
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From the above description, it is clear that Apple Afterburner is especially suitable for those who are dedicated to professional video processing (one Afterburner card can handle up to six 8K streams at 30fps or 23 streams of 4K/30 in Pro Res RAW). Nowadays, when recordings are made in huge resolutions and sizes, editing such videos is very demanding on computing power. And that's why the Afterburner card exists. Thanks to it, the Mac Pro can process up to several simultaneous video streams (up to 8k resolution), the decoding of which will be taken care of by individual cards, and the computing power of the rest of the Mac Pro can be used for other tasks in the editing process. Accelerators will thus relieve the processor and graphics card and increase the overall performance of the device.
On the other hand, it should be noted that this is a very specifically focused accelerator, which is exclusively intended for processing Pro Res and Pro Res RAW video. It doesn't help with anything else at the moment, although Apple can further update the list of formats that the Afterburner card can handle in the future by reprogramming the drivers. There is also a certain exclusivity with the macOS environment. In Windows, installed on a Mac via Boot Camp, the card will not work. Likewise, it will not be possible to connect it to ordinary computers, even though it has a standard PCI-e interface.
Apple presents its card as "revolutionary", although conceptually it is not a hot new thing. For example, RED, the company behind professional cinema cameras, released its RED Rocket accelerator a few years ago, which did essentially the same thing, only focusing on RED's proprietary formats.
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