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Activity Forums Adobe After Effects Unhappy with PC performance in AE

  • Unhappy with PC performance in AE

    Posted by Rod Duarte on February 24, 2020 at 5:30 am

    Hello!

    So I’ve just upgraded my PC, from this:

    Previous build (Intel)

    To this:

    New build (AMD)

    Here’s a list of just the parts I changed, to make it easier to see:

    New parts

    And as a bonus, here’s a video of me actually building it:

    Youtube

    Now as you can see, all my four RAM slots are populated and I’m at 64gb of RAM.

    This motherboard does support 128gb but that would mean swapping all 4 sticks, and it’s pretty hard to find high speed 32gb sticks at the moment. I’m running 3600MHz ones, which is what’s recommended for Ryzen, right?

    Now, in After Effects, whenever I’m doing any sort of fullscreen animation with blur, glow, etc, the preview takes MINUTES to render. Which is what it was doing before the upgrade. I’m seeing absolutely NO improvement in preview render times.

    Things export in Media Encoder WAY faster now, though, so that’s good.

    But, with the previews this sluggish, my workflow is unbelievably disheartening…

    Nevermind using 3D stuff. My god.

    I’m looking at the resource monitor in Windows, and while it’s trying to render, I don’t ever see the CPU go past 60% but the memory gets to 85%, so that’s why I’m thinking maybe going full 128 might help.

    Now, the only kit I’ve found that is 4x32gb and 3600MHz is a Corsair Vengeane one that goes for £600+, which is almost half of what I paid for the whole upgrade, and the three stores that would have them are sold out ATM.

    Now, is there anything else I should be looking at besides RAM here, or is this upgrade going to be worth it? My gut says it won’t. Maybe swapping the motherboard for a bigger one with 8 slots and adding 4 more of the RAM I have now? Which would actually be even more expensive but then at least I get to still use the RAM I have, and it’ll bring some benefits like more PCI slots… The case is a big ATX case anyway so it’d fit.

    Thanks in advance if you made it this far…

    HELP!

    Rod Duarte replied 3 years, 3 months ago 2 Members · 2 Replies
  • 2 Replies
  • Michael Szalapski

    February 24, 2020 at 6:53 pm

    Look at the website for Puget Systems. They do a LOT of testing of various components with actual usage with professional software including AE. They’ve got a lot of good writing on what makes your AE faster and what doesn’t.

    More RAM likely won’t make AE faster. It’ll make you able to hold longer previews in green though.

    Talking about making things faster in AE is very complicated. Sometimes the bottleneck isn’t the CPU or RAM at all and it’s file transfer speed. Or maybe it’s caught up with decoding a heavily compressed codec before it can even do your effects.

    As far as actual image processing goes, the core speed of your CPU matters most. Some things like Camera Shake Deblur, some of the grain effects, Wave Warp, etc. are multithreaded for rendering, but not everything is at the moment. A lot of effects are GPU-accelerated now, so if you use more of them (and you have a decent AMD or NVIDIA GPU), you’ll notice things being much faster than if you make the computer move frames back and forth between the CPU and GPU while rendering.

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    No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

  • Rod Duarte

    February 24, 2020 at 7:19 pm

    Right, the more RAM = more green thing makes sense.
    So most of the stuff I’ve been doing is shape layers and masks, so there’s no raster stuff being done.
    I’m ok with how long the exports are taking, because this beast of a CPU can do that while I play a game or do anything else on here really, including working on a different project.
    I just really can’t sit and wait MINUTES while previews happen. And I’ve seen youtube tutorials where they have smooth flow (and no, it’s not edited or sped up).
    Plugins like Saber for example… my God how heavy that one is.
    Transfer speed can’t be it, I’m running everything on a Sabrent Rocket PCI 4 drive. This is why I got a X570 board.
    The system is booting from a different SSD of course, but all the files and the cache are on the rocket…

    But yeah I’ll look at the Puget site!
    Thanks

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