Preview rendering very slow and laggy

Hi all,

I am experiencing an issue where the preview rendering is very slow, taking sometimes 30 seconds or more to render after scrubbing and I am trying to figure out why.

I have Googled and tried a number of common tips and tricks such as changing the resolution to a quarter, but that doesn't seem to help.

Attached are my base computer specs as well as screenshots of my "Previews" "Video Preview" and "Media and Disk Cache" settings in Adobe After Effects 2024.

Any and all help/ideas are much appreciated - happy to provide more info if it would be useful as well!

Thanks in advance to all the kind souls out there!