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erwink56065672
Participant
February 18, 2021
Question

After effects renders very slow on beefy CPU

  • February 18, 2021
  • 1 reply
  • 677 views

Hi,

 

I have a 6 second clip that has a few effects applied to it (nothing to fancy), but it takes my machine about 8 minutes to render. This is extremely slow if you'd ask me. 

 

I have a VM (XEON X5690) that has 8 cores running at 3.5Ghz and 32GB ram. Unfortunately it has no dedicated GPU. But, as adobe says itself, After effects relies more on CPU than on GPU. Right? While rendering this machine only uses about 5% of the CPU.

 

I've rendered the same composition on a different machine (3900X/32GB/RTX2080) and this machine is done rendering in a matter of seconds. Using about 25% - 30% of the CPU.

 

How come my first machine takes so much more time to render the same composition? Does GPU really do matter that much?

 

Thanks in advance 

    This topic has been closed for replies.

    1 reply

    Mylenium
    Mylenium
    Legend
    February 18, 2021

    AE is barely multithreaded nor does it support any fancy parallel processing and that is pretty much all there is to say. Your Xeon is useless, because all AE ever wants is a CPU with two cores running at maximum clock speeds. A Xeon can't do that. This has nothing to do with whether GPU functions ever come into play. It's just a given. The only reason your Ryzen CPU works better is because it can create manage its cores better and reach exorbitant single-core performance if it detects such a scenario. Some GPU functions may of course still figure in somehwere, but if they are, they don't make much of a difference and would only account for a fraction of overall rendering and chances are, that a lot of them get disabled due to unfavorable combinations of them exhausting GPU resources or falling under other restrictions/ limitations. Either way, this is nothing you can change. I would suggest you actually educate yourself about these things. this has been discussed ad nauseum in hundreds of posts on this forum alone under subject headers like "How to optimize performance in AE?" and similar.

     

    Mylenium

    E
    erwink56065672Author
    Participant
    February 19, 2021

    Thanks for the answer! If read a bunch of these posts, but it really just comes down to having a CPU with high single core performance.

     

    What system would you recommend? I would have to render a lot of these 6 second clips, like a lot! Each and every day. Maybe some high end ryzen system to have multiple VM's running on them. This way I could render multiple clips at once in different VM's.

     

    Something that has a good performance to cost ratio ofcourse 😜

    Mylenium
    Mylenium
    Legend
    February 19, 2021

    VMs impose their own limitations in terms of memory usage or access to GPU-based functions plus of course there's all that kerfuffle with Adobe's restrictive licensing, so this may not be an option at all. The forum is full on such issues with render farms and in your case the file I/O to distribute and access the source files might far outweigh the actual render gains, anyway. Therefore the simplest solution may indeed be to buy a cheap core5i computer, beef up the RAM and have it as a dedicated render machine chewing through your six seconds clips all day. You would only need to worryy about a suitable storage for the source files liek a reasonably beefy NAS that can be accessed by both computers with identical paths to avoid having to always collect files and copy over large amounts of footage time and again...

     

    Mylenium

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