Known Participant

Question

Why text layers are sooooo slow to work with?

Forum|Forum|1 month ago
February 18, 2026
3 replies
134 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

Kyle Hamrick

Community Expert

Are you only seeing this in 2026?

If this is a newer issue … have you recently installed some new fonts? I’ve definitely seen (and heard of) weird stuff like this that ends up being related to a semi-corrupted font file. Might be worth experimenting with copying your fonts folder and then reverting them to only the clean default ones. If that’s the issue, the trial and error of finding the culprit would obviously be annoying, though.

nishu_kush

Legend

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.

nishu_kush

Legend

Thanks for giving it a try. Is it happening across all the projects, or just in one? Do you mind sharing a screen recording of the issue and the After Effects project file for testing?

Looking forward to your response.

Thanks,

Nishu

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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