[Ali Afzal]

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The Xeon Platinum 8158 is not an outdated processor.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.