Today we released Mako Core™ version 8.0, the latest iteration of our print SDK built for developers creating print workflow tools and applications that need to interrogate, edit, and rasterize PDFs and other PDLs such as PCL, PostScript, and XPS.
It’s been a while in the making because the Mako team have been working on an exciting new development: Until now, rendering in Mako relied on Jaws—a robust, battle-tested engine with decades of heritage. But print workflows keep getting more demanding, and our customers are always chasing more performance, less hardware.
So just over a year ago, we asked: What if we could radically accelerate PDF rendering using the GPU?
The result? With Mako 8.0 we are also announcing Apex™, the world’s first fully GPU-native PDL renderer. Unlike solutions that offload only parts of the rendering pipeline, Apex handles all rendering tasks on the GPU—including transparency compositing, color conversion, font rendering, image processing, and vector drawing. This is not GPU-assisted rendering. This is GPU rendering, end to end! Mako is the first Global Graphics product to make this exciting new technology available, as an add-on to your existing Mako license.
Mako 8.0 has a complete Apex API, so it’s fully ‘Apex Ready’. In fact, Mako is what makes Apex possible; all the “plumbing” that we need to handle incoming fonts, color, images and vector objects is already present in Mako, which allowed our developers to focus on the GPU implementation. And as a developer of core RIP and rendering technologies, we had the huge advantage of being able to compare results—not just with Mako’s built-in Jaws renderer, but also with the world-class Harlequin RIP®. Consequently, we have been able to mature this new development very quickly.
One of our first decisions for Apex was to choose an API layer that was sufficiently low-level for performance but would insulate us from the complexities of different GPU vendors’ implementations. We chose Vulkan for our GPU-based PDL renderer, not just for its raw power, but because it offers low-level control, high performance, and efficient multi-threading. Vulkan’s cross-platform capabilities and reduced driver overhead also help ensure consistent results across diverse environments, important for us as Mako too is available across several platforms.
Oh, and Apex is fast. Really fast. For files with complex transparency and overprint, we are seeing as much as 20x performance increase, compared to Mako’s built-in Jaws renderer.
As you can imagine, we are very excited about this new development. Check out this video that shows Apex in action!
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Further reading:
- Introducing Mako Core 7.3.0 : new PDF capabilities and PDL simplicity
- Film: Choosing a print Software Development Kit (SDK)
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