Big workstation upgrade - Still poor AE/ME export speed on simple projects

Question

Maybe this is just status quo for AE, but I'm hoping someone has an idea.

I recently went from a Lenovo P16s with just 32GB RAM, middling CPU (i7-1260P), and a horrible GPU (T550) - all the way to a Legion tower with an i7-13700KF, 64GB system RAM, speedy 1TB SSD, and an RTX 4080 with 16GB.

So, you would think when I loaded up a 40 minute 1080p video, did a simple trim with some cuts and freeze frames (yea, I should have just used Premier, but I didn't) - you would think that I could export a little quicker than 50 mins! I mean, even the old P16s could export a 40 min 1080p faster, I'm pretty sure.

Nothing fancy for settings:

Doing a two pass VBR
I have multi-frame rendering enabled
I have 52GB allocated to the Creative Suite apps
47GB disk cache set on a SSD with 250GB free space
Maximum render quality (but not 'render at maximum depth')
I have the Mercury CUDA option on
I see in the performance monitor that it's pegging the GPU about 85%, and about 2/3rds the GPU RAM - so I know it's using the GPU and not the CPU
Disk is writing at about 2% maximum speed, so that's not the bottleneck - copying another MP4 to/from the same drive yields a 750MB/s speed
System RAM is showing only 40GB used of the 64GB total available, while the render chugs away

Everything else is zips along FAST with this machine - an order of magnitude above the P16s on everything else: Photoshop large file edits/writes, OpenRefine large dat clustering, Topaz upscaling, massive 200k x 200k row cross-referencing in Excel - it all seems significantly faster except for After Effects / Media Encoder.

Similarly, even scrubbing in the regular AE/UI, with a simple 1080p comp, no effects placed yet, nothing - there's that audio & playback slowdown which distorts the voices and slows the payback speed. It'll eventually catch up after a few stop/starts. But dang, I was expecting it to behalf much, much better on this new workstation. Playback window set to 50% downsample does improve things significantly - but I would expect a 1080 to be able to play back flawless, with seamless scrubbing. Am I delusional?

ṇubbudbud · Answer

Nope, AE just kinda uses all the resources it can, but doesn't really get faster. Maybe 60% faster from a 2008 machine to 2024, but that machine would ideally be like 250-400% faster in other things like blender. It just cannot support its bulk, and AE 2022 (the last I checked I think) was 22% slower than CS6, with all hardware acceleration and multiframe rendeting on.

Probably the biggest speed drop is that your old machine likely had 4 beefy cores, but now has 16 smaller cores. Even if the cpu was 400% faster than your previous one, core to core, they would average the same speed... which is notable because from my experience, everything but multi frame rendering is happening on one really sweaty core.

Also RAM only increases playback length, and GPU isn't really a thing here.

Try turning off hardware acceleration, or I guess compare with davinci resolve to see if the new vs old is really working as expected for media work.

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