After Effects not using CPU/GPU, Preview not working, constant crashes with multiple videos (Latest

Hello Adobe Community and Support Team,

I’m experiencing severe and persistent issues with Adobe After Effects (latest version) and I urgently need help, as the software has become unusable for me.

A few days ago, everything worked normally and I was able to create videos without any problems. Since recently, however, After Effects behaves extremely unstable and shows no proper system usage.

Main issues:

• The Preview does not work at all anymore.

• When working with video files, After Effects often freezes or crashes.

• As soon as I import more than one or two video clips, the application crashes consistently.

• In many cases, simply switching to another application (for example, watching a YouTube tutorial) and returning to After Effects causes an instant crash.

• This behavior is fully reproducible.

Performance & hardware behavior:
What is especially confusing and frustrating is that:

• GPU usage (RTX 5090) is extremely low or inactive

• CPU usage is also very low

• RAM is not fully utilized

• The system is clearly not under load at all, yet After Effects is unusable

I would actually expect a heavy workload on my system during previews or playback. I would much rather see my hardware fully utilized than having no load and no performance. It feels like After Effects is simply not using my hardware correctly, or something is blocking proper processing.

What I have already done:

• Latest NVIDIA GPU drivers installed

• Latest motherboard BIOS and chipset drivers

• Latest Windows updates

• Latest Adobe After Effects version

• GPU Acceleration enabled

• RAM optimized and preferences checked

• Media & disk cache purged multiple times

• All system components and software are fully up to date

I have also spoken to other experienced After Effects users, and the crashes always occur once more than one or two video files are used. This strongly suggests a software, compatibility, or preview/render pipeline issue rather than a hardware limitation.

System specifications:

• GPU: NVIDIA RTX 5090

• CPU: Intel Ultra 9 285K

• Motherboard: Z890

• RAM: 64 GB DDR5 6000 MHz

• Storage: 4 TB SSD

• Power Supply: 1000W

• OS & Adobe Apps: Fully up to date

Given this high-end system, the lack of hardware utilization combined with constant crashes is very concerning. I would really appreciate guidance from Adobe Support or anyone who has experienced similar behavior.

Thank you very much for your time and support.

Best regards