Interface is Slow and Laggy

Care to explain how a program's UI can get slower on faster, newer hardware? Or get slower with updates and bugfixes? I understand slight regressions here or there for important features, but this is ridiculous.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVu0uuGvEY0

@jenkmeister17177426 Ran the test again with layer controls off and it's marginally better but still concerning overall.

This time around trying to illustrate the performance drop when selecting more than 10 keyframes...same overall setup as before. 

In the beta (24.4.0 x20) w/ controls off I got about 25-30 FPS when selecting 10 keyframes and dragging them about (2-3 frames to update)

In the stable build (24.2.1) I got about 12-13FPS doing the same thing and the update time jumps all around from as good as 2 frames to as bad as 10 frames. So there has been a significant improvement when moving a small amount of keyframes. Not 60FPS smooth, but reasonably smooth overall. 

Again in the beta, once you jump up to 50 keyframes in the beta it takes about 6 frames to update the screen, or about 10FPS. About 2-3 FPS better than with layer controls left on but still nowhere near what I score as "smooth."

I didn't try to score 50 Keyframes in the stable build with controls off, but that is a known "laggy" interaction so didn't feel like scoring it.  

P.S Updated to the latest nvidia studio driver 551.86 for these second batch of tests. 

Thanks for the feedback @Scott.C. and the videos as well. I think that delay you're seeing is still then related to the drawing of the overlay/layer controls which is still being worked on. Could you try turning those off and run the same tests and see what FPS you're able to get? 

Hi @jenkmeister17177426

Thanks, I really appreciate the quick response. Let's hope you will be able to fix it soon!

@jenkmeister17177426 

I get that this is early days on this re-code of the interface but was hoping for a little bit more of a FPS boost than what I'm seeing currently. 

Hoping this is cleared up with the aforementioned layer controls bug but I was getting pretty bad dropped frames even with those turned off. Video attached of my test. 

TL;DR. Still drawing keyframe icons at about 7FPS when the goal should be at least 30-60FPS.

I spent a little bit more time with the beta today and did my standard AE "tortue test" of trying to move around 50 keyframes on solids with no animations. In my opinion this should be no issue but AE struggles with moving keyframes around still and that drives me mad. I concur with Carlos that the general snapiness is much improved but once you move into heavier numbers of keyframes it still lags pretty heavily. 

Test setup.

1920x1080 24FPS comp

100 Solid Layers

Position keyframe placed all on the same frame (alt+shift+p)

Select first 50 keyframes.

Drag them about while recording with OBS. 

Count number of frames until keyframes jump to next position and determine keyframe draw FPS.

No animation should have to be recalculated and the "frame render time is at 6ms" or 166FPS. 

AE 24.2.1. (current stable) - no better than 6FPS

AE 24.4.0 (current beta) no better than 8FPS

As a comparison I selected a bunch of animation free keyframes in blender and dragged them about and it had no issue drawing the position of the keyframes on every frame. Not an apples to apples comparison obviosuly, but still think there is far too much jank in the timeline. 

The goal should be to draw the keyframes or other timeline elements (including window resizing, other aspects of the interface) at 60FPS. Even 30FPS would be game changing, currently still dealing with 6-7FPS on fairly simple edge cases. 

@Carlos Zenzuke Albarran I suspect the "more keyframes, the slower it gets", is related to the layer overlay drawing which is one of the things still on the list to improve. 

@marco san Thanks for the feedback. Similar to @Carlos Zenzuke Albarran, the overlay drawing is still being worked on to speed up. The 3D gizmo is also high on the list to a) speed up the rendering of and b) a better experience where you won't see a gizmo for every layer if there are multiple layers selected. 

As I said, we aren't done, just the first step in the journey to getting AE's UI and Comp viewer out of the way and getting you all back to working instead of needing to post on the forums 🙂 

Ok, the really really bad keyframe problems are mostly gone, thank god for that (even though it's progressively slower the more keyframes you select when that shouldn't be a problem at all), but this, being as it seems a rewrite or refresh of the UI system is REALLY underwhelming seeing it's maybe back to being as good as it was ten years ago, not BETTER and definitely not SMOOTH. Also, the darkest option is too dark and the middle one is too bright, so it's very ugly to my eyes now.

Hi there @jenkmeister17177426 

As I reported in the feature post, I just tried AE beta 24.4.20. finally the timeline panel lagging is almost gone, but, 3D gizmos lagging is really really really bad, as I show here.
https://youtu.be/aqfmHvd3D4Y
It's unusable! Please fix it. It's impossible to work with 3D layers. I reported the issue 2 years ago. It doesn't make sense to add 3D features if the 3D UI doesn't work. I'm on Ryzen 2700x, 32GB ram, Rtx 4070 super.
Cheers

@jenkmeister17177426 Haven't had too much time too look into it yet but initially the basic OP problem of box selecting keframes seems to be dramatically improved! THANK YOU! Honestly wasn't sure this day would ever come, but this makes me very happy for my quality of life going forward! Will do more testing tomorrow!

@Scott.C. A few minutes ago we posted 24.4x20 of the AE Beta. In that is a set of fixes around UI performance on Windows. This should speed up the interaction of the UI in the timeline and in the comp panel. I'd love to know if you see any improvements. More information about the changes (including the adoption of a updated look including a light mode) is available here: https://community.adobe.com/t5/after-effects-beta-discussions/feature-focus-new-after-effects-spectrum-ui-amp-windows-ui-performance-improvements/m-p/14497629#M3373 

And no, this is not the end of the road. We know there are many things still to improve (overlay rendering speed, the 3D gizmo rendering speed, more work on the UI overall), but hopefully this is a start.