The bottleneck is usually in SD card write speeds, however. Sport photographers often skip raw and only use JPG because the files are smaller and as a result, one can take more photos in one burst.
For raw at high frame rates, high end cameras don't use SD cards but things like CFexpress which absolutely can keep up (and there are also various compressed RAW formats these days which apply a degree of lossy compression to reduce file size).
As I understand it, the reason some professional sports photographers don't shoot RAW (or it's less important) is more because they are in an environment where publishing quickly is important, so upload speeds matter and there isn't really much time to postprocess.
Canon’s “sport professional” camera has lower resolution than the “second tier” cameras. It has a higher frame rate and CFExpress and SDXC2 so bandwidth isn’t an issue. Last I checked you could burst 40 or 50 frames (at 20ish fps) before filling the internal buffer.
You can definitely do more than that these days. My Nikon Z8 can do 30fps with 1xCFExpress, and the flagship Z9 can do 120fps because it has 2xCFExpress and alternates writes. On the Sony side they have a closer differentiation to what you describe, the flagship (A1 II) does only 30fps compared to the next-best (A9 III) which does 120fps, while the prosumer (A7 RV) only does 10fps.
I don't know Canon well, but 120fps w/ dual CFExpress + 800-1200 frames buffer is fairly standard on top-end professional sports/wildlife mirrorless cameras these days.
tomatocracy|11 months ago
As I understand it, the reason some professional sports photographers don't shoot RAW (or it's less important) is more because they are in an environment where publishing quickly is important, so upload speeds matter and there isn't really much time to postprocess.
FireBeyond|11 months ago
tristor|11 months ago
I don't know Canon well, but 120fps w/ dual CFExpress + 800-1200 frames buffer is fairly standard on top-end professional sports/wildlife mirrorless cameras these days.