Updates to Aperture, Final Cut & Logic will tap into horsepower of new Mac Pro

All three applications will see significant gains in loading, import, and export time thanks to the new Mac Pro's faster PCIe-based flash storage. Apple's previous generation professional tower relied on Serial ATA (SATA) technology for its drive interfaces, limiting transfer speeds —  even with speedier solid-state drives (SSDs) —  to an absolute maximum of roughly 375 megabytes per second, though that is a speed rarely achieved in real-world implementations.

The next-generation Mac Pro's new PCIe-based storage interface, however, can drive data transfer speeds up to 1.2 gigabytes per second in real-world usage, according to Apple. PCIe achieves these significant gains by attaching the flash storage "closer" to the CPU —  that is, PCIe-based storage has more direct access to the processor, while SATA-based storage must first pass through an external controller chip.

Aperture, Apple's curation and postprocessing software for professional photographers, will especially benefit from this faster storage speed, Apple says. Photographers often work with Aperture libraries that are tens of gigabytes in size, and storage devices are often a performance bottleneck.

Final Cut Pro X has been optimized for the upcoming Mac Pro by enhancing support for the desktop's dual GPUs, which Apple says will improve real-time playback performance, speed up rendering, and decrease export times in the video editing app. The Final Cut update will also make it faster and easier for editors to monitor 4K video projects with Thunderbolt 2 or HDMI displays.

In addition to gains in project load times from the new Mac Pro's faster storage, audio editing app Logic Pro X will receive a boost from the tower's Thunderbolt 2 support. Cupertino says the Mac Pro's six Thunderbolt 2 ports, with maximum transfer speeds of 20 gigabits per second, will allow producers to add more ultra-low latency audio channels without the need for expensive internal add-on cards.