Today we released version 8.0, the latest iteration of Mako Core™ our print SDK.
It’s been a while in the making because the Mako team have been working on an exciting new development. Mako Core has a built-in renderer based on Jaws, a trusted component whose roots go back decades. As our customers are always pushing for higher performance and to spend less on computing hardware, we wondered if we could accelerate PDF rendering using a GPU. So just over a year ago we began a development project to investigate that.
The result? With Mako 8.0 we are also announcing Apex™, an entirely new renderer that runs natively on a GPU. 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 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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