My hardware encoding has been disabled.
- December 5, 2025
- 4 replies
- 1234 views
I've been editing in After Effects for 3 months, ever since I bought my graphics card (RTX 3050 6GB). I've always preferred the After Effects render queue to Media Encoder, since my PC is a bit slow and I prefer not to waste time exporting directly to h264 mp4. However, yesterday (I had already rendered a video normally), when I needed to correct an error in the editing, I went to export it and it took about 1 hour and 20 minutes to finish. After that time, I discovered that the "hardware encoding" option was disabled. Shortly after these problems, I received a notification about an Nvidia driver update (NVIDIA Studio Driver v.591.44), and I made sure to update, thinking that was the reason for the deactivation. That's why I'm asking here: is this new driver incompatible or something like that? Because I've tried everything and I can't enable hardware encoding, not even Media Encoder had that option available anymore. In short: my hardware encoding was disabled, even though I had always used it.
My PC isn't powerful; it only has this video card that gets the job done. However, as I mentioned, I always used hardware encoding, but it was disabled for some reason.
After Effects still recognizes the graphics card; the only option disabled was hardware encoding.
Does anyone know what might have happened or can help me re-enable it?
NOTE: Hardware encoding is not working in either my After Effects 2023 or After Effects 2024.
