• Adobe After Effects

  After Effects – PC Hardware

  Posted by Danny Sparks-cousins on June 5, 2009 at 1:27 pm

  Ok – I have decided to build a new PC for After Effects & Premiere CS4 running on Vista 64-bit. So far the specs I am looking at are as follows;

  Asus P6T-WS-PRO (8x Sata RAID)
  Intel i7-920 / 2.66GHz
  12Gb Corsair DDR3
  7 x Seagate Barracuda 1.5TB (1 system, 3x RAID0 arrays)
  Corsair 750W PSU
  LG DVD Burner

  Now the only thing I cant decide on is the graphics card. I will be going with one of the Quadro OpenGL cards but dont know how much performance difference in After Effects rendering speed there will be between the following cards;

  FX 1700
  FX 3800
  CX Cuda

  Each of the cards are a little over $1000 (Australian) more as you go up the range, so I am keen to get a decent performance increase to justify the cost. Has anyone used these cards in a CS4 After Effects environment? We use a lot of particle systems and complex camera moves with DOF so want to build a very capable machine.

  If anyone has other comments about the other hardware please let me know.

  Kind Regards,
  Danny

  Danny Sparks-cousins replied 17 years, 3 months ago 2 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

• 

  Adolfo Rozenfeld

  June 5, 2009 at 6:29 pm

  If you mean rendering as exporting from the Render Queue, zero difference.
  OpenGL in AE is much more about having fast, responsive previews while interacting with elements than it is about accelerating renders.
  I am not sure I can appear favoring one card over another, but don’t expect any of them to provide any advantage in rendering speed.
  A higher-end graphics card will support more sophisticated operations for interactive previews (for example, Depth of Field simulation while you adjust a 3D camera) or give you better looking results, but it’s not usually something you use as a replacement for AE’s software renderer.
  So, the graphics card does improve performance in the sense of having a more responsive experience.
  If you invest on a dual-quad xeon system (even more RAM would then be a good idea), rendering speed will see a more direct impact than with any graphics card. A good graphics card (listed in Adobe’s OpenGL page) is still a good investment for the reasons I explained above.

  Adolfo Rozenfeld · Adobe
• 

  Danny Sparks-cousins

  June 10, 2009 at 6:08 am

  Ok – I think I might go for a midrange graphics card and spend the rest on CPU, RAM and RAID.

  So can you please shed some light on what drive configurations are the best for using to work with Premiere & After Effects? How many drive arrays? What to put on separate drives / arrays? Capture, Projects, Temp, Render etc?

  Cheers,
  Danny

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