The new Mac Pro can be customized and expanded to some pretty insane levels, but most videographers and photographers are probably looking at builds that are less than the maxed-out version. This video shows how impressively even the base model Mac Pro performs when one adds the Afterburner accelerator card.
Coming to you from Jonathan Morrison, this interesting video shows how the new Mac Pro performs in its base configuration with the addition of the Afterburner card. The Afterburner is an optional accelerator card that speeds up the decoding, playback, and transcoding of ProRes and ProRes RAW files. In turns, this frees up the processor cores to focus on other tasks, such as adding effects to the timeline. Morrison decided to see how much he could push the card, and the results are quite impressive, as he plays 15 unrendered streams of 4.5K Pro Res 4444 XQ video with the CPU barely registering the activity, before he moves on to creating a 16K timeline that plays seamlessly, again with the CPU unstressed by the activity. The results are quite impressive, especially considering he is using the base model with only the addition of the accelerator card. Check out the video above to see it in action.
Hey man, just a heads up, but the content you are trying to rip is a dead link..
That's crazy! The link is broken, the video can be found on his YouTube channel though https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvS7FHtm2BI
Thanks! Not sure why the original link went dead.
Well, it's an accelerator card for hardware playback of ProRes. Playback should be smooth and offloaded from CPU. That's all it does and should do. The card costs $2000.
Obviously the author or Jonathon have never seen what FPGA systems can do. Yes, they're fast but at a cost. In plain terms for those that don't know. FPGA is a single focus CPU as compared to RISC/x86 which are designed to be multi-purpose. So if you fall within it's niche of supported applications then it can be extremely fast, but fall out of those pre-programmed parameters then it's a expensive paper weight. Also FPGA chips are extremely power hungry and dump a lot of heat, which you can see from the size of the heatsink.
So if you work exclusively within a Pro-Res environment and use supported software then great solution. On a side note AMD has a alternative, if somewhat rare, solution the Radeo Pro SSG which approaches 8k + editing from a different direction localised GPU caching which is 1Tb or 2Tb NVMe drives attached to a graphics card (!). Just in case anyone wondered if there was alternatives not sure if the new Mac Pro would support it but Linux and Windows does.
Alex, thanks for posting this spec as most have focused on a fully loaded MP.