What is carrying After Effects, the RAM or the GPU?

[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

Unless you do a lot of 3d work in CS6 you should not worry that much about the video card (GPU). RAM and faster CPU’s is what helps AE.

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist

[Walter Soyka]

[Brian Wells] “Maybe someone can clarify… I have read that AE needs large amounts of RAM to work fast, on the other hand, all pixels are now rendered through Open GL, which means the GPU is doing all the work? Or is it the RAM that is most important?”

CS6’s new 3D ray-tracer uses CUDA with select NVIDIA cards, but the Classic 3D renderer (the same renderer available in prior versions of Ae) renders only on the CPU.

One of the ways to speed up After Effects is to enable multiprocessing. This exploits multicore CPUs by essentially launching multiple copies of the After Effects Classic 3D renderer and rendering multiple frames at the same time. Each instance of the renderer requires its own RAM.

Adding system RAM so you have at least 2-4 GB per core on your computer will help you speed up your previews and renders by allowing you to make better use of all the CPU cores in your system.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Todd Kopriva]

I’m confused about your statement that all pixels are processed through OpenGL. Where did you get the idea that OpenGL is being used for all rendering?

Here are details of GPU usage in After Effects:
https://blogs.adobe.com/toddkopriva/2012/05/gpu-cuda-opengl-features-in-after-effects-cs6.html

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
After Effects quality engineering
After Effects team blog
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