I have a super powerful computer and After Effects is still lagging...

Report · Mar 19, 2025

Last year, I finally got into the editing world. Things were going so well that I decided to buy a computer powerful enough to work faster, complete more advanced projects, and climb the ladder in the editing world.

I bought an i9-14900k + RTX 4090 + 64GB + 1T SSD (one of the best, by the way). To my surprise, since last year (August), since I opened After Effects, I feel like the improvement from my old computer, which is MUCH inferior to the one I have now, is very small.

The program lags to the point that it's impossible to work, and this is with just a few effects. They aren't even large compositions or projects. When I apply the first effect to the first text, everything lags.

I've tried talking to technical support, I've watched all the YouTube tutorial videos to improve Ae, an Adobe technician was on my computer remotely and couldn't do anything...

It's frustrating to have an investment in a good computer like this and not be able to work comfortably. I'm asking if anyone knows a solution, please help me...

Report · Mar 19, 2025

Hi @HAISVZ ,

Sorry to hear you're having issues, as this is not the experience we want you to have, nor is it normal. Since you said you're experiencing these performance issues with even a simple comp, it sounds like something else might be causing issues, so I have a bunch of questions to help narrow down the potential causes.

What exact version of AE are you running? Not just the year like AE 2024/2025, but the version you get from Help > About After Effects.
Has this issue persisted across updates? If you're on AE 2024, have you upgraded to AE 2025? What about installing AE (Beta)?
What GPU driver are you running, and have you updated? We always recommend the Studio Drivers vs. the Game-Ready drivers.
It sounds like this issue is very easily reproducible for you. Could you create the simplest project that causes the issue and DM it to me?
Are you working locally on a disk or doing work off of a network drive or a syncing cloud folder from Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, etc? If the latter, try in a non-syncing folder to see if the issue still happens.
Do you have any third-party plug-ins, ScriptUI panels, or Extensions (CEP panels) installed?
Do you have any anti-virus software running that you could temporarily disable as a test?
Could you please share a full UI screen recording showing the problem in action?

There are a bunch more questions I could ask, but lets start with these. As you said, you have an incredibly powerful machine, so what you're experiencing isn't normal, so let's try to get this sorted out for you.

Thanks,
- David, After Effects Engineering Team