iMac Pro slow performance

Same here. I got a fresh install with a similar iMac Pro configuration and it's almost unreal how bad it performs. Affinity Designers or Sketch work extremely well though. Seeing how long this problem already persists, I wonder if Adobe even cares. I guess I am gonna give the Affinity suite a serious try now. 

I'm having the same problem running AE on my new 8-core 64 gb iMac pro (2017). Painfully slow. I still have my old 2013 Mac Pro tower and I'm thinking about switching back to it and using this iMac as a super expensive monitor. 
Do you think the older Mac Pro can handle AE better? 

Also, doesn't adobe know their audience? I would think a good majority of its users are on Macs.  

I do have an iMac Pro with the same 3GHz 10 Core Processor and 16GB Vega 64 GPU (only 32GB Ram though) and I do have the same problem. For me it seems to be overall performace though (benchmarks are fine) and I am not using Adobe but Final Cut Pro X. Guess what, same problem and Genius Bar said they can't do anything. I came in after the 14 day return policy so nothing they can fix or test. So here I am, having a 7100€ machine that is slower than my MacBook Pro when I need to edit 4k (with the "well optimized" Apple Final Cut Pro). Not sure if it is soley an "Adobe not optimised for Mac Hardware" Problem.

I can imagine you problems with single core CPU Speed, if i am not wrong, i think adobe killed Multi CPU Rendering in AE, i remember the time when you could switch it on an off in prefs and it was a mess, the computer could only render then, nothing else.

Little Tip: for your final render, use terminal rendering (ae render), there you can make benefit from your multi core a lot, you can open at least the number of cores you have (hyper Threading included) as terminal render windows. It can be very fast an useful for bigger projects.

I've done extensive testing and made faulty investments myself and learned the hard way. But it is what it is, and I can tell you that the top of the line iMac Pro, which I assume you bought, is the slowest of all iMac Pro models in After Effects (and that's the way it will be, forever....unless Adobe start making AE from scratch in a different way).

Ram has hardly anything to do with speed. The only reason why a lot of Ram is good, is that it takes longer before the machine starts scratching to disk and it can hold more preview frames in memory which will feel like a faster machine. The speed of the ram doesn't make much difference in AE either.

AE prefer a machine the same way as games. Meaning few cores and fast cores. Which is the opposite of what you have bought, and in fact the cheapest option. Plugins in AE are being rewritten one by one for each update Adobe does, but they tend to make the new updates GPU dependent. If you buy a 5ghz intel CPU machine with a fast GPU, that would be the fastest option on the marked today, and it cost about 20% of your iMac Pro.

Honestly, Macs are the slowest and most expensive option you can get for Adobe programs. If you really want as much speed for your bucks as possible, you need to read up on pages like pugetsystems.com and see what hardware they recommend for which softwares and then build your own machine or order it from a company (like puget). If you by any means want to stick with a Mac, then get a regular iMac with a faster CPU and as much ram as possible, it would perform a lot better than your iMac Pro in After Effects, that's just how it is, sadly.
i.e. Mac Pro, the most expensive one of apples models, performs about 50% of the speed of an intel 5ghz CPU , thats approx 4X the price for HALF the performance!! (caugh, rip off)

Same same

iMac Pro 3 GHz 10 core etc, etc and a massive 128GB RAM. Preview in AE is exactly the same as my old 2013 iMac which has 3.5 GHz and 8GB RAM. So it looks like I just spent AUD$13,600 for nothing. Yay!

I'm also very surprised and disappointed at how little difference an extra 120 MB of RAM has on AE preview performance. I read so many articles stressing the importance of RAM in After Effects. From what I can see the difference is negligible.

So I'm probably going to return my iMac Pro, explain in great detail exactly why I'm returning it and get a full refund. My wife will be ecstatic, Tim Cook, not so happy.

Sure, my measly $13,600 dollars isn't going to send Apple spiralling into debt but by the looks of things I'm not the only person with this problem. If Apple and Adobe don't resolve this problem it will put a dent in Apples bottom line and CEO's don't like that.

Unlike me, If you're a smart person who does their re-search before buying products I should point out that the iMac Pro is an incredible machine. I did some stuff in Cinema 4D and it flies. It really is a delight to use.

Well, it's nearly Feb 2019 and AE on my new fat iMac is still no better. Premiere is so much better but I swear AE was faster on my 2015 MacBook Pro!

Any news Adobe?

What starts to become a mac bashing thread should actually be Adobe bashing, or am I wrong?

So are high end Windows machines better in general than iMacs? This was a pretty depressing thread for a 2017 iMac owner to read.

Best way to get action is to up vote the request here

Full program multi-threaded support – Adobe video & audio apps

It's apparently the one place where adobe engineers decide what gets looked... but it depends on the number of votes so go over there and vote people!