Apple has revealed its professional application suite — Â Aperture, Final Cut Pro X, and Logic Pro X — Â has been optimized for the company's upcoming next-generation Mac Pro, and that the desktop computer will bring "unparalleled power" for the software.
Apple says Final Cut Pro X will make significant performance gains with the 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 — Â even with speedier solid-state drives (SSDs) — Â 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 — Â that is, PCIe-based storage has more direct access to the processor, while SATA-based storage must first pass through an external controller chip.
The new Mac Pro's twin AMD FirePro graphics processing units
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.
58 Comments
If they added some OpenCL filters for some audio processing on Logic Pro, it would be awesome. Even if they begin by just accelerating an small subset of filters, it would be very helpful for convincing the public that the dual GPUs are also useful for audio...
Not much of an Aperture update if all 3.5 (from 3.4) does is provide hooks for taking advantage of a faster machine that won't ship until Xmas. BTW : The white balance tool is broken; bug in multiscreen use that screws up the secondary screen in some arrangements; users below 10.9 are shut out. No other differences to 3.4 that I can see. Not an update to applaud. Absolutely pointless to install it.
Do we know that 3.5 is the update Apple mentioned in the keynote?
So maybe you shouldn’t have installed it, then? Quit whining.
Enough! Just start selling the Mac Pro already!
Apple seem to be firing on all cylinders in software. They just released a tidal wave of software... Well done. Keep it coming, Apple. Lemon Bon Bon.