After Effects Freezing on New High-End PC (RTX 5070Ti, 32GB RAM, Ultra 9 CPU)

[La�s_10]

Hey everyone,

I just got a brand new high-performance PC, but I’m having serious issues running After Effects. The app freezes as soon as I try to play back a composition — the playhead doesn’t move, and I eventually have to force quit.

My setup

Processor: Intel® Core™ Ultra 9 275HX (24 cores, up to 5.4 GHz, 36MB cache)

RAM: 32GB PCS PRO SODIMM DDR5 4800 MHz (2 x 16GB)

GPU: NVIDIA® GeForce® RTX 5070Ti – 12GB GDDR7 (DirectX 12.2)

Storage: 2x 1TB PCS SSD PCIe M.2 (3500 MB/s read, 3200 MB/s write)

PC: Windows 11

After Effects version: Latest (Creative Cloud)

What’s happening:

I can launch After Effects, create new compositions, add text, layers, effects — no problem there.But when I try to preview or play the animation, the timeline/playhead doesn’t move at all.The program then becomes unresponsive and I have to force quit it.

No error message, just a freeze.

What I’ve tried:

Restarting the computer

Reinstalling After Effects

Updating GPU drivers (NVIDIA)

Disabling hardware acceleration

Clearing the media cacheRunning the app as administrator

Still stuck with the same issue. Anyone else experiencing this with a similar setup or have any ideas what might be causing it? Would appreciate any help — I bought this machine for creative work, and this is a real blocker.

Thanks in advance!

[sai_ganesh_6393]

Facing the same issue with 5090, this is happening only in AE but Premier is running without any issues.

[nishu_kush]

Sorry to hear about your issue.

Updating the GPU driver is the first thing that I'd suggest. If that doesn't help, can you check if the beta version works better? Some preview-related issues were fixed and shipped in the beta version. Here's how you can install: https://adobe.ly/4jImKQT

Let me know how it goes. Moving this thread from Bugs to Discussions for troubleshooting.

Thanks,
Nishu

[sai_ganesh_6393]

Even beta version is crashing.

[nishu_kush]

Are there any error messages or crash reports? Is there a specific action/command that triggers the crash?

We're here to help.

Thanks,
Nishu

[La�s_10]

Hi,

Thanks for getting back to me.

Same situation on my end the issue is still there, and unfortunately, no error message or crash report is generated. After Effects just completely freezes as described above, especially when trying to play back the timeline.

Appreciate any help or suggestions. Thanks again!

[jefubbudu]

I would suggest trying gimp and resolve in the meantime. AE has a small team of like probably a dozen or two to update it and it's historically late to the party. Maybe disabling hardware acceleration and manually disabling any E-cores can help. Adobe software is mostly from the 90's and early 2000's so it hates having many small cores to juggle, and GPU is a bit of a hack that only works for a few effects I find.

But adobe software really does NOT scale well with computer specs. Every gig of RAM is like a second of 4k footage in the cache, double CPU transistor count and you'll get 10-25% faster renders. It's sad.

[paythisman]

After Effects Performance Issues - RTX 5090 System

System Specifications

• GPU: RTX 5090
• RAM: 64 GB
• CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D 8-Core Processor
• OS: Windows 11 Pro
• Storage: 2x 1TB SSD

Background

I'm experiencing severe performance issues with After Effects on my high-end PC that are impacting my ability to meet project deadlines. I recently upgraded from a MacBook Pro M1 (64 GB RAM) to this high-end PC specifically to improve my After Effects workflow. However, I'm experiencing severe performance issues that are impacting my ability to meet project deadlines.

Issues Experienced

Performance Problems

• After Effects is extremely slow and unresponsive
• Application startup is problematic - interface elements don't load simultaneously
• Screen flashing and general bugginess
• Laggy performance even with simple projects
• After is using every bit of the RAM I give it when there is just one video on the timeline

Rendering Failures

When attempting to render a medium-complexity 1.5-minute project, I have a 5090!!!!!! I receive the following error:

After Effects error: After Effects has encountered a failure (code: 19969) 
related to GPU-enabled effects on this frame. This is likely because your 
GPU is out of memory.

Please decrease your rendering resolution, close applications that may be 
using GPU resources, or set this project to render effects using "Mercury 
Software Only" in File > Project Settings > Video Rendering and Effects

Troubleshooting Steps Attempted

• Updated GPU drivers to latest version
• Tested After Effects Beta version (same issues)
• Allocated 40+ GB RAM to After Effects
• Reduced RAM allocation to 16 GB (slight improvement but still problematic)

Current Status

The system is barely functional for simple projects and completely fails on more complex work. Given my tight deadlines, I urgently need a solution to make this high-end hardware work properly with After Effects.

[nishu_kush]

Thanks for sharing the details. Would you mind creating a screen recording that shows the performance issue in After Effects? It'll help us to understand it better.

Regarding the rendering issue, it seems that either your project uses complex effects, or the media is pretty large resolution, or it could be a combination of both. Try to optimize the media. If that doesn't help, try disabling your effects and see if that brings any change.

Thanks,
Nishu

[paythisman]

Hi Nishu,

I'm sending you the video where you can see that After Effects flickers frequently - it's very buggy. I need to click multiple times just to get the project to open.

Some of my compositions have light text animations and 4K resolution videos in matte shapes. It's completely glitchy, and when I double-click the video to show how it should look, AE can play it back. I can try reducing the resolution, but I think my system should handle this since even HD videos are lagging.

I'm also sending some After Effects logs from when I tried to render a 1.5-minute sequence, along with error logs and screenshots of the errors I've received.

*P.S. I want to point out that I've tested extensively and removed all my plugins, running completely vanilla After Effects - still no change, equally buggy. I've changed resolution, tested older versions of AE which were also buggy, and adjusted how much/little RAM AE gets to use. The strange thing is that the more RAM I give AE, the more laggy it becomes, which is weird. My monitor is Samsung G9

Thanks

[nishu_kush]

Thanks for sharing the screen recording and other details. What's the exact version of After Effects you are using? Some of these issues were fixed in a recent release (25.3.2). Please update your After Effects if you haven't already. 

For the other issue, we might need more details about the project. Which effects are used? Does disabling the effects help? If yes, we may need to check why. This problem appears when the frame requires a lot of memory. Usually, an effect like Motion Tile can cause this when values are cranked up more than what's needed. There are other effects as well.

Thanks,
Nishu

[paythisman]

I'm using After Effects version 25.3.2, so I have the latest release.

The effects I'm using are mostly text property animations, tint, and fast blur - it's not motion tile. I've also tried disabling the more demanding compositions to see if I could render anything, but no, I still couldn't.

The project is medium-sized with solid backgrounds, some text animations using text properties (many without motion blur), and some video in shape masks. No other effects, no glow or anything like that. I tried using some lens blur but AE couldn't even handle it, so I removed it.

Here's another issue: When I try to render, the process fails at random points in the timeline with error messages, and After Effects never completes the full render. The stopping point is inconsistent - sometimes it renders 20 seconds before crashing, sometimes 30 seconds, sometimes 40 seconds, but it's always a different point each time. I can play back the partial renders that were created, but I've tried disabling the compositions where it typically fails and I still encounter the same rendering problems.

[nishu_kush]

Thanks for sharing the details. Looks like we need to dig deeper. Please check your DM.

Thanks,
Nishu

[jefubbudu]

Yeah, like I said, AE just is no longer up to complex stuff. I used to, back in 2015, but since then, performance has gotten worse on existing hardware. I can't imagine how bad it would be now on my 9950x and probably doesn't even recognize my arc A770.

Actually, AE might be trying to use arc integrated graphics from your CPU! That's an A-series card so it's the same as my arc A770!

Like i said, just go into settings, disable hardware acceleration, then go into device manager, disable your intel GPU altogether, and then delete all caches, and try to render again.

 AE does NOT play well with GPU rendering. Most of its existence has been CPU rendering only, and even them, it hates small cores, and high core count systems. The entire UI needs to fit on just one.

As well, you might want to check the temps of your machine. Recent intel chips have been real toasty, and that can make systems unresponsive and unstable.

[paythisman]

Thanks for the advice! You're probably right about the Arc GPU causing issues It's frustrating that windows version of AE has gotten worse. I'll try disabling hardware acceleration and the GPU, then clear caches and test again. 

[jefubbudu]

I wouldn't say it's gotten worse... though it definitely has been getting laggier as more features are added atop an old base that hasn't ever been totally refactored for more modern things like GPU's and CPU's with more than one core. Basically, their idea of multithreading, is a full version of the renderer on each core, with all its overhead, and so on.

[Johan33441262p7e6]

Downgrading to NVIDIA Driver to v.573.22 fixed the issue for me. Using After Effects 2005.3.2

[nishu_kush]

Thanks for sharing the great insight, Johan. Let us know if it happens again.

Thanks,
Nishu