AE CC 2017.x painfully slow UI

[William Patin]

Ever since switching to Windows 10 earlier this year, working in AE has been a pain in the a**–a problem that has been addressed quite a few times in this forum. I've seen this problem appear in PS on a late 2013 iMac (3,5GHz, 32GB RAM, NVIDIA 780m) when using GPU accelerated features, but thought it would be a temporary issue, while Adobe switches more and more towards GPU acceleration. Now that I am on a Win 10 i7-6900k Workstation (32GB RAM, 2x NVIDIA GTX1070), AE is suffering the same overall lagging.

AE's UI refresh rate approx. drops down to 2fps when scrolling/navigating in the Effects Control or Composition panel. It doesn't matter whether I'm working on an empty or a heavy project, the issue occurs from the very first moment on AE is loaded. The irony of it all, is that the performance in the Viewport is good, so GPU acceleration is working fine in the background. Only the UI isn't benefiting acceleration.

Here are some further informations:

• my NVIDIA Control Panel settings for AE are set to use the GPU's and the overall settings, the NVIDIA drivers are being updated regularly
• the Creative Cloud and the Adobe Apps are all up to date
• I'm running the OS and Apps from an SSD, the AE Cache is set to an internal HDD 7200rpm though
• the issue has been persisting since I set up my workstation in January 2017

Any ideas on how to fix this? The same AE version on the iMac isn't affected.

[foughtthelaw]

which version of AE are you currently using?

[William Patin]

AE v.14.2.0.198

[P.M.B · Accepted solution]

This may bum you out but there's a chance you might get better performance with a single GPU.  I mean it seems logical to think that if one GPU is good than two will be better but the dirty little secret is that dual gpu's can slow things for software that's not optimized for it. 

[William Patin]

Thank you very much Mr. Fish! I changed the CUDA GPU to a single one in the NVIDIA Control Panel, and it increased the UI's responsivity instantly.

AE's UI still isn't as responsive and fluid as on my old Mac, but it's already a dramatic improvement. I'd like to see it being optimized further though, as I don't really want to accept that AE should have any performance problems with graphics card from the Pascal generation. Are there any other known issues with CUDA and AE?

[P.M.B]

Oh I'm glad that worked for you.  I honestly don't that much about it off the top of my head.  The dual card thing i just knew for some reason but not directly in relation to after effects.  Dual cards can slow lots of things down although it's getting to be less and less.  Same with multi-core processors Back in the early days of dual core I used go into my task manager and disable one of the cores and would get much better performance in lots of programs.   Most programs are optimized for it these days but not AE...AE is a hot pile of mess.    But I love it (except when I want everyone responsible for it to die),. But mostly I love it.

[Nick_Moritz]

Unfortunately I have almost the same setup like William has but with one GTX 1070 and I experience the same issue - 2-5 fps frame rate in AE user interface. I suppose windows version of the AE UI does not optimized at all. Never saw such slow UI for any other software... I think it's a shame for such huge company like Adobe not to do at least something in this direction... I even didn't mention about UI scale for 4k monitors... total sadness...

[OisOis]

Hi,

I think I have to put my feedback here...

AE UI is slow like old pentium, that's really a shame (I think it's slower than the UI of my Amiga back from the 90's.

Yesterday I've had a direct comparaison with another similar "heavy loaded UI software" which is "FL Studio 12" by image line https://www.image-line.com/flstudio/ where you interact with thousands of layers with thousands of notes/samples and graphical animated elements.

Open the software, open a demo project, play it -> OMFG it's 100 times faster than AE, how can it be possible? the UI responsiveness is amazing !!! Please Adobe let's make AE great again on every release you're degrading the overall performance.

[stib]

Having the same problem. Even very simple compositions slow the UI to a crawl. Rendering is fine, it's just that actually working on any projects has become almost impossible. And when you get a comp with a couple of hundred layers, forget it. Make a change, go and have a coffee, and if you grind the beans, and take your time tamping down the grounds, and wash your cup afterwards, then you might be lucky to find the UI refreshed when you get back. My liver is suffering from all the caffeine.

This is simply not acceptable for professional grade software.

All the other software (well except maybe some of the other Adobe apps like Illustrator) run fine on this machine. They should, it's a beast: dual xeons with 20 cores each and a couple of 1080 TIs. I don't want to hear that Adobe hasn't worked out how to do multiprocessing or can't use 2 graphics cards. Sorry, it's 2018, that's how things are these days—even my phone has 8 cores.

I've been an AE fan since the nineties, I know it inside out, but Nuke and Fusion are looking increasingly attractive these days.