After Effects causes high VRAM Usage on GPU

[NxtFresh]

Hey,

so After Effects is not performing very well on my PC. Sometimes its so bad that my PC Frezzes and i have to power reset it. I ran some checks and the Problem is that when After Effects is open my VRAM Usage Jumps from 300 mb in use to 7,8 GB in use. I check and it looks like After Effects is using almost all of my VRAM on my GPU. That causes the System to Frezze. 

PC Specs

CPU : Ryzen 7 2700x

AIO : Corsair iCUE H150i ELITE CAPELLIX 360MM

GPU : RTX 3070 Gaming OC

RAM : Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro 16 GB 3200MHz

Here are to Screenshots of the Problem

Without After Effts

I dont know why After Effects does that and it only happens when i render the Project with my GPU, the second problem it that it doesnt even peform good. When i render with the Software encoder its smoother then with my GPU. Sometimes even effects dont render with my GPU and i had a problem with a Project where i coudnt render it using my GPU because it Media encoder either failed or got stuck at a Frame.

Thanks for reading this and for any Help

(English is not my first language so pls dont just say that its bad i know)

[nishu_kush]

Hi Olivier,

Welcome to the community and sorry for your issue.

We'd love to help you troubleshoot. Would you mind sharing the following details:

• What's the exact version of After Effects you're using? 
• What happens if you disable the Multi-Frame Rendering (Edit > Preferences > Memory & Performance > uncheck Enable Multi-Frame Rendering). Does it lower the GPU usage? Does it improve the performance?
• Share details of the project you're testing it with. What kind of media, effects, and third-party plug-ins you're using?

We're here to help, just need more info.

Thanks,

Nishu

[NxtFresh]

Hi Nishu,

I use the newest Version (22.4) from the Creative Cloud App

Here is a screenshot with Multi Frame Rendering disabled 

The Video Content is on a Samsung 870 QVO 4TB SSD, I use Flow,Twitch, Sapphire and CONTINUUM as Plugins with alot of Position and Scale Keyframes. 

,Olivier

[Mathieu Durand]

Hey Olivier, try to go in your After Effects preferences and click Enable Mercury Transit in the Video Preview section.

It worked for me.

[NxtFresh]

Hi Mathieu,

I dont think it worked for me. I turned it on and the VRAM Usage didnt drop 

But thanks for your Help.

[Mathieu Durand]

It actually didn't. I thought it did for a bot, but no luck...

[Roland Kahlenberg]

Your system is imbalanced - too many cores but too little RAM - GPU is good on its own. Also, AE looks at the required calculations it needs and some effects and transforms can be performed on either the GPU or CPU. With such an imbalanced system, you will have a core or thread with too little memory to do heavy-compute stuff without having to utilize the harddisk as cache and this will likely be done very often. I suggest you invest in more RAM - ideally 2GB-4GB RAM per thread is desired. HTH. 

[NxtFresh]

What has my RAM with the VRAM of my GPU to do?

[Mathieu Durand · Accepted solution]

@NxtFresh I might have found a solution for you problem, my issue was resolved when I downgrade my NVIDIA drivers to this version https://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/175403/en-us 

I hope that helps you as well 😉

[jonkristinsson]

This is still a problem with the latest version of After Effects.

Downgrading my Nvidia drivers so drastically is not an option, as some 3D renderers require newer drivers. Also, having to use 4 year old drivers isn't really.. a solution to this. Adobe needs to adress the actual VRAM leakage that's happening, instead of us relying on workarounds..

My specs are

AMD Ryzen 9 5950X

RTX 3080 Ti 12GB VRAM

64GB RAM DDR4

Nvidia Studio driver 552.22

After Effects 25.1.0 (Build 68)

After Effects ends up using about 11 GB of VRAM and never letting it go, meaning all other apps start freezing up. And eventually After Effects also freezes up and produces black frames in the viewport. Leaving it idle (and no I don't have Cache While Idle turned on) also still takes more and more VRAM throughout the day.

It's basically unusable and it's been like this for years.

[unstopable_8372]

i exactly have the same probleme 

[schnudiesounds]

I can confirm this behaviour. Working in a all day scenario with Premiere Pro and After Effects, the VRAM starts to fill to the limit and all Applications start to get unusable as the UI even can't be handled anymore. Clear VRAM in AEX doesnt solve the problem. One has to close all Adobe Apps and Restart them. Unfortunately that's a misconception as the idea is to work with the apps simultanously. It's reproducable. I was in contact with the support with ideas like, please use older versions....My advice is to fix it! This behaviour became really akward with Versions 25 for Premiere and After Effects. No matter which driver for my RTX  5000 I've used.

My System: i9 14000k, 192 RAM, RTX 5000, WIN 11

Please, Adobe Team, get an eye on that. thx.

[schnudiesounds]

May I found a solution that worked for me a couple of times with in the Windows World: 

STRG + WIN + SHIFT + B, a shortcut that restarts driver and seems to flush the VRAM. I am still in testing mode in different scenarious, but so far it worked.