Previewing inside After Effects suddenly impossible

So I have a sudden issue with After Effects, and it's not project specific. Suddenly, and without any known reason that I can find, After Effects is taking longer to preview the comp and update the preview than it does to render. I even lowered the resolution of the preview down to a quarter and it still takes about 20 seconds to render 1 frame in the preview. 

This is on a brand new project, with a few text and shapes on it - nothing crazy, but I tried it on a project that was working perfectly fine yesterday and the same thing is happening to that project. Some of the comps won't preview altogether. I tried it on a blank project and added a few shapes and lines of text - same issue. I'm running a PC with an i9-10885H CPU and 32 GB of RAM, all my software is up to date, as well as all of my drivers.

My biggest gripe is that I can barely see what I'm doing at this point, and I can barely sync things up to voiceover with how lagged the preview is. Are there any optimal settings, tips or tricks, or anything that you could reccommend that could speed up the preview inside After Effects and keep it closer to realtime? Have you had this issue and found a workaround? Anything is appreciated!