Announcement: Windows on ARM Emulation in After Effects Beta

[Catie Bass]

We are excited to announce the public beta release of Windows on ARM emulation support in After Effects 25.4 build 34! This marks the first time After Effects supports the Windows on ARM platform.

In order to ensure After Effects works in emulation, please first download and install the most recent Qualcomm Adreno GPU driver for Snapdragon X Platform here: https://softwarecenter.qualcomm.com/catalog/item/Windows_Graphics_Driver?osArch=ARM64&osType=Windows...

After downloading the driver, unzip and run the .msi installer. After the installation completes, run After Effects (Beta).

If you receive a warning about the driver version, you will need to follow these steps to manually select the new driver.

1. Close After Effects (Beta).
2. Open the Device Manager in Windows.
3. Twirl Open "Display Adapters" to show the Qualcomm® Adreno™ GPU.
4. Right-click the GPU and select "Update driver".
5. Click "Browse my computer for drivers".
6. Click "Let me pick from a list of available drivers on my computer".
7. Select the driver with version "31.0.96.0 [3/4/2025]". It is most likely to be at the bottom of the list.
8. Select "Next" to activate the new driver.

Note: You may also be able to download the driver via your system’s updater application, for example, the DELL Command application.

We expect After Effects to run on all Qualcomm Snapdragon X-based laptops and tablets, but we have not tested After Effects on Windows on ARM devices with graphics cards from other hardware vendors.

We do have some minor known issues; we are working on resolutions and will update when we have news to share:

• Scene Edit Detection does not currently find all expected edits in a video when running After Effects in emulation mode on Windows on ARM.
• ProRes RAW import is not yet supported on Windows ARM devices.
• Clearing the Media Caches via preferences when running After Effects in emulation on Windows on ARM can temporarily cause the UI to reload slowly.

For those of you who have Windows on ARM machines, please give the beta a whirl and let us know how it's treating you. We're especially interested to know how third-party plugins are performing in emulation, as well as your general thoughts on the emulated version.

Thank you for being a part of our beta community and for your continued support!

[Erik Mijwaard]

Just installed it on my Macbook Apple M2 Max using Parallels. After opening I only get the warning 'Advanced 3D is not supported by the current hardware.'  because the display adapter uses Parallels Display Adapter (WDDM) which seems to only support 4093MB ram. Besides that, I quickly tried a render, which worked.
Will test headless mode asap, but this looks promissing so far. It means I can develop extensions and scripts on my Mac and test my scripts on Windows using the same Mac.
I love it.

[Flavio_St]

Good, and yet Parallels is already an emulation on it's own.

[Erik Mijwaard]

That’s true, Parallels is a VM. I realize it’s not native hardware, but for my use case which is testing AE scripts on Windows, it works well enough. Always open to tips if you know a better approach!

[Arie Stavchansky]

I tried installing After Effects (Beta) onto my Windows 11 VM guest OS running on Parallels on an MacBook Pro M1.

When I double-click to launch After Effects (Beta), I am met with an error message dialog.

I tried installing the Qualcomm drivers, but that also did not help.  I could not even see a new display adapter when I opened the Device Manager after installation.

Is there anything else I can try?  I develop plugins for After Effects and this would help my development workflow tremendously if I could figure this out.

Any suggestions for troubleshooting?

Thanks,

Arie

[JohnColombo]

Hi @Arie Stavchansky,

Thank you for posting about this. The error you're encountering is generally encountered when either Visual C++ runtimes are not updated or when AVX2 support is not detected. What specific version of Windows 11 are you using on the VM?

Cheers,

- John, After Effects Engineering Team 

[Arie Stavchansky]

Hi John!   Good to hear from you and thanks for your reply.  Here is a screenshot of the System Info dialog from the Win 11 guest OS running in Parallels:

Of note is that when I check for updates via "Windows Update" it shows that everything is up to date.  Should I download the new runtimes?

[JohnColombo]

Hi all,

Native builds of After Effects (Beta) for Windows on ARM are now available; the latest Beta builds no longer use Intel emulation. Full details can be found here: https://community.adobe.com/t5/after-effects-beta-discussions/announcement-windows-on-arm-native-in-...

Cheers,

- John, After Effects Engineering Team 

[Enthusiastic_Odyssey7043]

I'm definitely satisified with the beta version so far but I’m really looking forward to the full version of After Effects being available for on

ARM devices. Could you share any updates on whether this is actively being developed, and if there’s a rough timeline for release?
Thanks for all the great work – excited to see what’s coming!

[Catie Bass]

Hi there! Glad to hear you're satisfied so far. I can confirm that we are actively continuing work -- in fact, we launched our WinARM native beta 2 weeks ago! We're also working closely with our 3P plugin developers, both those that come bundled with After Effects and those that don't, so that your plugins will be able to work on WinARM just as they would on other Windows machines.

Our compatible formats list is growing (and our incompatible formats list is shrinking); I'll spend some time getting that information updated in the sister post today! I appreciate the reminder.

Best,

Catie
After Effects Product Manager