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synthetick
Community Expert
Community Expert
November 21, 2025
Question

Fractal Noise vs. Turbulent Noise render speed comparison

  • November 21, 2025
  • 0 replies
  • 40 views

Hi, I’m investigating speed differences between Fractal Noise and Turbulent Noise. There’s a lot of decade-old videos on YouTube and documentation on the web saying that Turbulent Noise renders faster than Fractal Noise. Even the most-up-to-date official AE help pages say that "The Turbulent Noise effect takes less time to render." ( https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/using/noise-grain-effects.html )

However that is not my experience at all on my M2 Mac Studio running AE 2025, where Turbulent Noise performs worse than Fractal Noise. I have significantly faster (up to 3 times faster) renders with Fractal Noise versus Turbulent Noise. An Adobe Community thread from 2017 mentions that Fractal Noise was a new addition to the GPU accelerated family in 2017. ( https://community.adobe.com/t5/after-effects-discussions/fractal-noise-bug/td-p/9294540 ) I examined my GPU usage in Activity Monitor and found that Fractal Noise utilizes my GPU much more effectively than Turbulent Noise.

So I'm wondering whether most of the online info about Fractal Noise's performance is outdated. Would anyone be able to share their own experience of Fractal Noise vs. Turbulent Noise render speeds?

And side question: Which effect do you prefer? The controls are almost identical but I personally go for Fractal Noise because of the seamless looping option. However Turbulent Noise "more accurately models turbulent systems, with smaller noise features moving more quickly than larger noise features" according to Adobe's documentation.