Mac Pro Afterburner card now a standalone purchase

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Apple's Afterburner graphics accelerator card is now available as a standalone purchase.

Apple is now allowing users to separately purchase the Afterburner accelerator card for the Mac Pro as of Wednesday with a $2,000 price tag to boot.

The card can now be ordered from Apple’s online store. Currently, there is a five to seven business day shipping period.

Apple Afterburner is a PCIe accelerator card specifically for the 2019 ‌Mac Pro‌. When the Mac Pro went on sale last December it was configured with an Afterburner card. With presumably more available stock, Apple is now allowing standalone purchases.

The chance to buy the card separately is great news for those who held off in buying for financial reasons. It is designed to massively accelerate Apple’s ProRes and ProRes RAW video codecs in Final Cut Pro X, QuickTime Player X, and supported third-party applications. The card offloads all rendering from the graphics processor, accelerating the decoding and playback of multiple streams.

With its steep $2,000 price, the card is not for everyone, but focused on professionals such as television news operations that need quick results.

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