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.