After Effects 2023 - Adding 64GB RAM

Report · Jul 26, 2023

I just bought a new laptop from MSI Bravo 15 with a 16GB of ram installed. But I decided to buy 2 sticks of ram to 64GB of ram. Under the Task Manager > Performance, it is showing that I have the AMD Ryzen 7 5800H with Radeon Graphics. The Chip Type is AMD Radeon Graphics Processor (0x1638). I have the MSI Center app installed. I tried to select the "Mercury GPU Acceleration (OpenCL)", but it would not let me and gave me an error. I can only use "Mercury Software Only" to render.

After I installed the 2 sticks of 64GB of ram into the MSI Bravo 15 laptop, the rendering time of a 4 minute song went from 30 minutes to 1 hour longer. For some odd reasons, the 16GB of ram that was pre-installed with the MSI laptop was faster (30 minutes). While the new 64GB of ram that I installed took over an hour to render the same 4 minute song.

Now I am thinking of returning the 64GB of ram back since it did not speed up the rendering time.

Is there really a huge difference between "Mercury GPU Acceleration (OpenCL)" vs "Mercury Software Only"? Does the "Mercury GPU Acceleration (OpenCL)" produce better video quality and rendering time?

Anyone else experiencing the same issue with adding a 64GB of ram?

Thanks for any help!

Report · Jul 27, 2023

You're working with a couple different things here that aren't related. Adding more RAM to your machine will certainly help After Effects create longer previews and should benefit you. My guess is that your timeline was already partially cached when you rendered out your file with 16 GB of RAM. A proper test would be to purge your cache before rendering the job with each amount of ram from Edit > Purge > All Memory & Disk Cache.

GPU acceleration will not make your video quality any better, but it will help process tasks faster. My guess is that you need to update your GPU drivers in order for this option to become available again. Check AMD's driver site to see if there's a more recent version than what you have.