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sumtriffle
sumtriffle
Participant
Apr 18, 2026 5:42 AM UTC
Question

After Effect 2026 playback lagging heavily despite decent PC

Current Spec: 64GB DDR4, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060, AMD Ryzen 9 5900X, set my disk cache at 115GB on 3400MB/s read speed, about 5000MB/s write speed, set ram reserved for other app to 6GB, paid application, enable multiframe rendering
Something likes this took me like 1 min to play back, its literally just basic 3d rotation and positioning keyframe, no crazy plugin or effect
Tried switching the codec for the video on another comp but it doesnt help much
I can add some other settings/info if needed

    13 replies

    Nishu Kushwaha
    Community Manager
    Nishu KushwahaCommunity Manager
    Community Manager
    Oct 7, 2026 7:34 PM UTC

    Hi all,

     

    Does this issue still persist? If yes, can you test it on the latest version of After Effects (26.5)?

    Let me know how it goes.

     

    Thanks,

    Nishu

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    Hani ElTiby
    Inspiring
    May 3, 2026 11:28 AM UTC

    There is also a 3D cache. you can empty it from Preferences>3D>3D cache

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    Hani ElTiby
    Inspiring
    May 3, 2026 11:24 AM UTC

    Did you try purging all cache and memory?

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    Nishu Kushwaha
    Community Manager
    Nishu KushwahaCommunity Manager
    Community Manager
    Apr 20, 2026 4:40 PM UTC

    Sorry to hear about the issue. Are you working with a screen recording? If yes, can you try transcoding it? Screen-recorded media is often recorded with variable frame rate, and After Effects sometimes struggles with it. Transcoding the media will change it to a constant frame rate.

    Let us know how it goes.


    Thanks,

    Nishu

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    real_5081
    Known Participant
    Apr 20, 2026 7:25 PM UTC

    I've been seeing quite a lot of reports of people with Ryzen  CPUs and Nvidia GPUs reporting similar problems to me. I have a 5950x, 4080 and 128gb RAM and I've found Premiere and AE 25 and 26 slow to the point of being unusable. Resolve, Blender and every other app I use runs perfectly - these are the only two I have problems with. Gone through every troubleshooting and bug fix but the performance is drastically worse than older versions on the same PC.  I'm just wondering if my setup will never work properly now 

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    jefubbudu
    jefubbudu
    Inspiring
    Oct 8, 2026 2:53 AM UTC

    That's largely because AE doesn't scale with GPU, and can actually get worse with many small, average cores over a few large fast ones. Nvidia's best GPU's are twice as fast as AMD's, but in AE they're not really all that different, and all the main AE processes outside of rendering a frame share the same core, but you can spend less time juggling data in and out of the main core while that core is rendering while that core is shuffling around AE's obscene RAM usage... so if that main core is a 16th of the CPU... yeah. Not ideal... And the RT cores and AI cores take up valuable space for graphics processing areas, so only 3D rendering or LLM's can take advantage of a good chunk of 40 and 50 seties nvidia GPU's

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    jefubbudu
    jefubbudu
    Inspiring
    Apr 18, 2026 6:22 AM UTC

    Yeah that's normal. AE doesn't like mp4, but beyond that it doesn't really use GPU, and a 20-45 minute render is common on heavier comps.

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    sumtriffle
    sumtriffleAuthor
    Participant
    Apr 18, 2026 6:47 AM UTC

    My point is its not heavy though, its literally just 2 layers with 3d enabled no effect

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