AfterburnerSource: Apple

What you need to know

  • Adobe is adding support for Apple's Afterburner Card to Premiere Pro.
  • It added the feature to recent Beta builds.
  • Unfortunately, users aren't yet able to identify utilization and are being asked to share their experiences.

Adobe has added support for Apple's Afterburner card for Mac Pro to Premiere Pro in recent beta builds.

In a blog post at the start of the week Adobe stated:

In recent beta builds (14.3.0 and newer) we've added support for Apple's Afterburner accelerator card which is an optional component available for 2019 Mac Pro systems. Currently we support decode acceleration of ProRes 4444 and 422 codecs using the Afterburner card. Please note: ProRes RAW acceleration via the Afterburner card is not currently supported - although CPU decompression is available for ProRes RAW.

Apple's Afterburner card for the Mac Pro handles ProRes and ProRes RAW image processing, to help share the load of graphics processing on the Mac Pro. For the Adobe applications that this is not supported for (in beta), you'll need to enable the Metal renderer, but Adobe notes this is already the default setting.

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Adobe says that "Unfortunately there is currently no way to identify utilization of the Afterburner card", so you can't tell how much of the workload the Afterburner card is taking, but users are being asked to share their experiences.

Back in March, Apple made its Afterburner Card available as a standalone purchase so users could upgrade their Mac Pro with it. It costs a cool $2,000, and at the Mac Pro's launch was only available as an upgrade option.

All the graphics power

Afterburner Card for Mac Pro

Now available as a standalone purchase.

Apple's Afterburner Card is now available to purchase by itself. It works with the Mac Pro to take on the load of processing ProRes and ProRes RAW files, boosting your graphics performance.

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