You cannot buy Afterburner for a PC, but solutions like this exist in PC world for ages - hardware video encoders/decoders [0], not enough? FPGAs on PCIe are also here for ages [1,2]. Apple is great at reinventing the idea (and providing working ecosystem), but Afterburner is really nothing new.

[0]: https://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/products/4K-8K/ [1]: https://www.xilinx.com/products/boards-and-kits/view-all-pci... [2]: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/programmable/product...

We'll have to see real world benchmarks once it ships, but it could be that there’s no equivalent software + FPGA solution in the PC world.

Their crazy expensive monitor is another example. There simply isn’t something equivalent in the industry. It’s probably the best monitor for its niche application.