Skip to main content
Mücahit Turan
Mücahit Turan
Participant
March 8, 2026

After Effects 2026 - RTX 5090 (Blackwell) Performance Issues

  • March 8, 2026
  • 2 replies
  • 108 views

I am experiencing severe performance issues in After Effects 2026 with my brand new high-end system. Even on very small and simple projects, the software freezes, lags, and has render problems.

My system specs:
- After Effects 2026 (latest version)
- Windows 11 64-bit
- NVIDIA RTX 5090 (Driver 580.97)
- AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7970X 32-Core (4.00 GHz)
- 128 GB RAM

Issues I experience:
- Preview window freezes when pressing spacebar
- Program freezes when adding effects
- Render queue freezes even on small projects
- Mercury Playback Engine GPU Acceleration (CUDA) renderer is grayed out and cannot be changed
- GPU usage stays at around 1% during freezes — this is clearly not a hardware performance issue

Steps I have already taken with no improvement:
- Clean NVIDIA driver reinstall using DDU
- Disabled Multi-Frame Rendering
- Cleared all media cache and reset preferences
- Adjusted preview quality settings
- Updated all Adobe applications to latest versions

This system is extremely powerful and should handle After Effects with no issues whatsoever. Based on my research, this appears to be a known compatibility issue between Adobe software and the new NVIDIA Blackwell (RTX 50 series) architecture. There are multiple threads on this forum reporting the same problem.

I kindly request Adobe to prioritize a fix for RTX 50 series GPU compatibility. I will also be sharing my log file in the replies.

Thank you.

      2 replies

      R
      real_5081
      Known Participant
      March 25, 2026

      I have exactly the same issues with my 4070

      Luca34024800qqwn
      Luca34024800qqwn
      Participant
      March 10, 2026

      Jumping in here because I’m seeing the same situation and honestly I don’t think this is about the 5090 at all

      The problem seems much deeper and related to how After Effects has been evolving in the last versions

      The removal of the 2024 version is honestly ridiculous because it was the only recent build that was actually stable enough to work with. The 2025 release was basically unusable in many production environments and now with 2026 things have not improved, if anything it feels even harder to rely on it for daily work

      For context, this is happening on a completely fresh system:
      Fresh Windows 11 install  
      Latest Nvidia drivers  
      AMD Threadripper 99503D class workstation  
      128 GB RAM  

      This is not a weak machine and yet using After Effects has become a constant struggle. Stability issues, unpredictable behavior and overall performance problems make it very difficult to use in a professional pipeline

      At this point the question is simple: what is the direction here? Because right now many of us are losing confidence in the software as a reliable production tool

        R
        real_5081
        Known Participant
        March 25, 2026

        25/26 has been a humiliation for Adobe that they could let things get that bad. They gave me money off when I went to cancel so I have kept it for now, but I'd rather they just stopped breaking everything and I can do my work in peace. 

         

        Part of me wonders if they are planning to stop making AE.

        Terms & ConditionsAccessibility statement
        Using the community Terms of use Privacy Cookie preferences Do not sell or share my personal information ad choicesAdChoices