-
Need Help: After Effects 2023 Poor Performance on Multi-User RDP Setup
Hi everyone,
I’m running a setup with one main workstation and six HP T430 zero clients. The zero clients connect via Remote Desktop, and each user works under their own Windows account.
Main workstation specs:
- Model: HP Z8 G4
- OS: Windows 10 Pro
- CPU: 2 × Intel Xeon Platinum 8158 @ 3.00 GHz (2.99 GHz)
- RAM: 256 GB
- GPU: 2 × NVIDIA Quadro RTX 4000 (8 GB VRAM each)
- Storage: 256 GB SSD + 8 TB HDD (Western Digital)
The problem occurs with Adobe After Effects 2023 — performance is extremely poor. I often get “Out of Memory” errors, the system freezes for several seconds, and all zero clients disconnect.
What’s strange is that the GPUs are almost not being used, while the CPU and RAM are fully loaded. I would expect the GPUs to handle more of the rendering and preview tasks.
Interestingly, other Adobe apps like Premiere Pro 2024, Photoshop 2024, and Illustrator 2024 work flawlessly and run smoothly.
My questions:
- Has anyone experienced a similar issue?
- Is there any specific setting in After Effects, Windows, or Remote Desktop required to enable proper GPU usage?
- And if I plan to use Cinema 4D, Blender, Maya, or Moho in the future, am I likely to face the same problem?
Any advice, optimization tips, or shared experience regarding GPU usage in RDP environments would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks a lot for your time 🙏
replied 5 months, 3 weeks ago 2 Members · 3 Replies
-
3 Replies
-
yo Ali! I’m gonna be brutally honest: i did use the same computer in the past and i confirm that despite its specs sound decent, it far from being powerful enough for AE 2023, try installing a super old version more in line with the age of the processor, like After Effects 2016. It will go slightly better; but my recommendation is to change the whole computer with one with recent components. I hope this response doesn’t ruin your day too much, but i prefer to let you know the truth immediately. Good luck and in case you help assembling a decent After Effects computer, send me a private message.
-
Your suggestion is appreciated, but I believe there is a misunderstanding regarding the CPU.
The Xeon Platinum 8158 is not an outdated processor. It’s actually a very powerful dual-socket server CPU (48 cores / 96 threads total, 3.0–3.7 GHz), fully capable for heavy compute workloads.
The real bottleneck seems to be something different:
1. After Effects does NOT utilize multi-core CPUs efficiently
Most AE processes (UI, preview, many effects) are still single-core focused, so high-frequency desktop CPUs perform better than high-core-count server CPUs — regardless of how powerful the server hardware is.
2. GPU acceleration is disabled over Remote Desktop
This is the main issue in my case.
Over RDP, AE cannot access the NVIDIA RTX 4000 GPUs directly, which forces:
GPU usage → 0%
CPU usage → extremely high
RAM usage → unstable
RDP clients → disconnect during heavy previews
This explains the performance problems much better than the CPU age.
3. Locally, AE behaves differently
When running AE locally (without RDP), GPU acceleration works as expected.
So the workstation itself is not the problem — RDP is.
Thanks again for responding — just wanted to clarify the hardware capabilities and share what seems to be the real cause.
-
Thank you for your thorough description, but again, i’ve used the same system personally and i can grant you that with the right Ram speed and processor, After Effect becomes crazy fast.
Regardless, we’re all in the same boat and i with you the best
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up