Why text layers are sooooo slow to work with?

Forum|Forum|1 day ago
February 18, 2026
2 replies
8 views

I’m running into a 2–4 second delay when editing text layers. For some reason, it seems to lag every time the text is updated. Even after changing to another font (such as Arial), resetting the Character panel, disabling Faux styles, and lowering the preview resolution, the issue persists.

This behavior doesn’t seem hardware-related.

This is significantly affecting my workflow, especially given the premium price of the software. At this point, I’m considering moving to UE5 for motion graphics, particularly because of its real-time rendering capabilities.

For reference, my setup:
Ryzen 9 5990X / 64 GB RAM / RTX 3080 Ti 12 GB / 2.2 TB SSD
After Effects is updated to the latest version.

_Ae_performance_text

nishu_kush

Community Manager

Sorry to hear about the issue. Is it happening in a specific project or all of them? If the expert’s suggestion doesn’t help, try running After Effects in Safe Mode with third-party plug-ins disabled.

Let us know how it goes.

Thanks,

Nishu

S

SerbeksetinAuthor

Known Participant

Thanks for the advice. Unfortunately, this doesn’t fix the issue. I’ve seen many people reporting the same problem, but I haven’t been able to find a proper solution yet. Safe Mode doesn’t fix it either.

I have proper font management on my system, so I don’t see anything in my setup that could be related to this bug.

R

RobShultz

Community Expert

You may want to try clearing out your cache: go to Edit > Purge > All Memory & Disk Cache to instantly free up space and improve performance. Alternatively, navigate to Preferences > Media & Disk Cache and click Empty Disk Cache. This removes temporary preview files, reducing lag and resolving rendering errors.

I hope that this helps

S

SerbeksetinAuthor

Known Participant

Thanks for the advice. I run the Purge command every time I open the software, but this doesn’t seem to fix the issue.

Could this be a bug in the 2026 version?

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