What are the system requirements for After Effects for best performance?

Hi Logan Kristen,

Thanks for reaching out. If you are looking for the system requirements for installing and using After Effects efficiently I would recommend checking out these articles:

Minimum requirements: After Effects System Requirements​

Detailed Q&A related to what hardware choices need to be made before installing After Effects: https://www.pugetsystems.com/recommended/Recommended-Systems-for-Adobe-After-Effects-CC-144/Hardware-Recommendations

I hope it helps.

Thanks,

Shivangi

Hi Logan,

for Ae you'll need the highest clock count you can effort. I wouldn't put my hands on anything below 4GHz.

32 Cores are impressive, but completely useless when it comes to AE. Go with an i7 or i9. 4 Cores, 8 Threads is a good basis, 6 or 8 cores are thinkable, but read AE itself will hardly use them.

GPU is near to irrelevant. AE has some GPU accelerated effects, but its not an GPU based software. Go with Nvidia GTX 1050, 1060 or above should be just fine. Series RTX 2000 is overkill.

What you really need is a lot of RAM. At least 32 GB, better 64 or even 128 GB.

Here comes the trick: if you want to use all cores while rendering, you need additional render manager like RenderGarden. Those managers launches several render processes, but each process needs it own RAM spare. Basically. it's like running AE several times. The more RAM you have to spare, the more render processes you can launch and the better your CPU is used. If you want a high core rate, you need loads of RAM to use them. AE won't do it on it's own.

Don't forget about storage, SSD or NVMe for cache, SSD for OS and software. If you are working on a professional level, take care about security solutions, like Raid1. And don't forget about backups.

I'm running an i7, overclocked to 4,8GHz. 4 Cores, 8 Threads. 64 GB RAM and GTX 1080. Cache is on NVMe, the rest on SSD. Projects and Assets are on a server.

*Martin