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Laptops than come with AE supported graphics card? Or succefully using unsupported cards anyway?
I’m looking for laptops, new, used or refurbished that have After Effects supported GPUs installed (under $1000)…I am finding some in the price range, that also have 16 GB RAM and i7 processors…but they never have adobe’s officially supported graphics cards installed. Most often I see the GTX 1050 ti or Quadro K2000M.
The Adobe page only references these cards in relation to the “ray-traced 3D renderer”…which I’m not sure if I’d be using at all?I’m in a hurry to get a faster computer to finish a video project to play at my best friends funeral/memorial in a couple weeks, I don’t want to buy a new computer and find out that after effects crashes and errors constantly because of some graphics card issue. I have seen that some people edit a text file and get their cards working that way, or they download a specific driver build that works good…or sometimes unsupported cards just work anyway.
I’m pretty novice and don’t think I use any heavy effects or add ons. Just basic effects, transitions, animations and 3d layers so i can move the camera around and show images as if they were photos on a wall or floating in 3d space…stuff like that.
I’m currently using a 5 year old Lenovo Z585 laptop with “amd a10-4600m apu with radeon hd graphics 2300 mhz 4 cores, 4 logical processors” and 6GB RAM
all of which is under powered and “unsupported” by Adobe…but still runs After Effects…doesn’t crash or give errors…and I’ve completed and rendered 15 minute vids in the past with it. The main problem is that it’s just slow, slow ram previews….i can only ram preview about 10-20 sec at a time and I have to do it at 1/3 or 1/4 the quality. Rendering a final video can take a whole night or day or both. So my main issue is really just speed for work flow.So I’m just wondering, if I find a laptop with the specs i want, and i price i can handle but the graphics card is ‘unsupported’ should I buy it ?
Or is there a laptop in my price range with a supported card that I could buy quickly on Amazon or something ? Thanks -
1 Reply
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[michael morrow] “The Adobe page only references these cards in relation to the “ray-traced 3D renderer”…which I’m not sure if I’d be using at all?”
Don’t make purchasing decisions around the Ray-traced 3D renderer; it’s a dead end in Ae development. If you need 3D in Ae, you can use the newer CINEMA 4D renderer instead, which works on any CPU and is not accelerated by any specific GPU.
More RAM and a faster CPU should help noticeably, but please keep in mind that it’s pretty easy to create complex effects in Ae that are slow to render on any system. Here’s a reference for some things you can do to improve performance in Ae, which includes some workflow tips:
https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/using/improve-performance.htmlWalter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn]
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