New computer - After Effects slow - Performance used 5%

[genuinegys]

Hi,

To speed up my work, I recently bought a new computer. Unfortunately After Effects (and illustrator) are running slower(!) then my old pc did. I use the fastest SSD possible for my files, scratchdisks, databases, caches and all. I have GPU power enabled, without any result. Also my computer is only using 5% of its CPU power and 19% of its memory. What am I doing wrong? Please help.

                Processor:      AMD Ryzen 7 1700X Eight-Core Processor          (16 CPUs), ~3.4GHz

                   Memory:      65536MB RAM

          DirectX Version:   DirectX 12

Card name:                     NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti

Sincerely,

Gijs

[Mylenium · Accepted solution]

What am I doing wrong?

You bought a new computer without asking beforehand. That's all there is to it. There's a gigazillion threads on this forum that explain how limited AE is with parallel processing and multithreading and how it baerely uses any GPU. You are looking for something that doesn't exist and there is no magical switch that can fix it for you. You simply bought an Edsel. The same could be said for Illustrator - most of its operations are single-threaded even, so it never uses any extra CPU cores. Any additional slowdowns may also be caused by GPU compatibility issues, but perhaps you can fix at least those by updating the graphics driver.

Mylenium

[genuinegys]

Hi Mylenium,

Thanks for your fast feedback. So there isn't much I can do except for hoping Illustrator and After Effects get recoded soon?
I knew After Effects mostly uses the CPU and it only uses the GPU for ray traced 3D. How do other users work with this? They buy a strong single core processor?

Drivers are up to date,

Sincerely,

Gijs

[Nexahs1138]

In what way are they running slower? If you have a 65 GB of RAM computer there shouldn't be an issue. How much RAM are you allocating for AE, the best is around 70%. Also, where are you storing your source files, if they aren't on your desktop then it will be slow.

[genuinegys]

Hi Nexahs1138,

I'm storing the source files on my primary disk right now.

It still is slow. Pre-rendering is do-able, but moving objects and scrubbing through the timeline is a headache.

Appreciate the help!

-Gijs

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hi Gijs,

Did you get your questions answered with the help of experts on the post? If not, let us know so we can assist you further.

Thanks,

Kevin

[genuinegys]

Hi Kevin,

Well, I sort of gave up looking for answers and use the computer for different programs.
Is there an answer to this?

If this doesn't help, I'm forced to sell the computer to buy a computer that does work with After Effects.

🙂

Sincerely,
Gijs

[֑nubnubbud]

big oof.
you probably got something with a lot of cores, a beefy GPU, and 64 gigs of RAM...
and yep that seems the case. minus the GPU.

believe it or not you could do worse. After Effects is a 1993 program. that means for two computers with equal speed and transistors, the one with more cores is going to be much slower, because AE will only use one per frame at a time. I highly suggest getting the latest 4-core CPU from intel like an i3-13100. Not sure how the others in the line up will work because they have multiple core sizes. maybe efficiency cores (which are locked to 1 thread) are faster for AE. the i3-13100 has 4 cores, but new dense archetecture means if you turn off hyperthreading, it should be faster than a lot of even higher cost cards for AE specifically.

AE is from like 30 years ago. it hates today's hardware (which you seem aware of, getting a 1080.) I would turn off GPU btw. it's unstable. AE was never made for it.

[֑nubnubbud]

however, davinci resolve should work better on that computer than my old workstation. it's worth a shot. it's no AE but it can do the basics of both AE and premiere.