-
Graphics Card for AE?
I’m running on a fairly new (12 months) Dell PC with 2 GB of RAM and 220 Gig memory – additionally I have an 80 gig External drive.
However, I am beginning to find working in After Effects painfully slow – the PC just wasn’t out together to deal with it it seems. I know absolutely nothing about hardware so my question to you AE pro’s/enthusiasts is:
What can I buy that will make my After Effects experience faster/more productive?
Is there a graphics card you’d recommend? Can I somehow increase the RAM on the PC? What do you have installed in your own machines?
Any reccomendations of what I can do/purchase to make my machine ‘fitter, healthier and more productive’ – I’d appreciate it big time.
Cheers all,
Thom Yorke.
Not really. My name’s Dave.
-
3 Replies
-
[Dave Forrest] “Is there a graphics card you’d recommend? Can I somehow increase the RAM on the PC? What do you have installed in your own machines? “
Even the heftiest graphics card on the market will not improve your AE renders very much if at all.
RAM does give you more power, but any non-64-bit OS can only use up to 3GB of RAM for AE. With a 32-bit OS such as most of the XP and Vista varieties you are limited to 4GB of RAM total (with at least 1GB reserved for OS and other uses), the OS will not recognize more RAM than this.
I have 4GB of RAM on my Mac Pro at work, and it works well for me. The amount of RAM you’d want on a 64-bit OS like XP/Vista 64 or OS X is largely dependent on how many processing cores you have. I have 4 cores and I limit AE CS3 to only using 3 of those during renders, so ideally I should have around 6GB of RAM (2GB per core). If you have an 8 core machine then you might want as much as 16GB of RAM, but likely you’d be fine with far less.
More RAM + more processing cores = more frames rendering simultaneously with CS3’s multiprocessing capabilities. This is a pretty tangible benefit.
If you only have a single processing core then there is no reason to have more than 4GB of RAM, as even with a 64-bit OS AE is still a 32-bit process and can only access up to 3GB of RAM per instance/core.
Darby Edelen
Lead Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA -
Thanks Darby. Woah! It’s complicated – I knew it would be.
OK, So I have a Dell Dimension 9200 which is running on Windows XP Professional, Version 2002 – Service Pack 2.
I believe this information relates to my processor: Intel(R) CORE 2 CPU 6600 @ 2.40GHz. 2.39GHz, 2.00 GB of RAM.
Judging by your advice it seems that the most I can do is upgrade the RAM to 4 GB. Then I can attrinbute 3 GB to AE and have one for the OS. Does that sound about right?
I thank you in advance for excusing my laughable lack of knowledge in this area.
Cheers,
Dave.
-
[Dave Forrest] “Does that sound about right?”
Yes, although in order to allow 3GB of RAM to be used for any processes in XP you need to enable the /3GB switch in your boot.ini file.
I don’t know all the details on this process, but you can read up on it here:
https://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/server/PAE/PAEmem.mspx
It sounds like it’s not an ideal way to set up your system, but it might work.
With 2 cores you would then be able to give each core 1-1.5GB of RAM to work with during renders, and this should result in almost doubling your render speeds in the best case (This only applies in CS3 or if you have Nucleo Pro).
Darby Edelen
Lead Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up