After Effects / Windows 11 GPU freeze or hang with Nvidia 2080 Ti on alt tab - my fix

[pacey-j]

A real quick one to hopefully save someone else literal weeks of pain and frustration – after a full reinstall, swapping out hardware and lots of other steps it may have been as simple as this all along:

Edit > Preferences > Display

Uncheck hardware accelerate comp, layer and footage panels.

My AE was crashing multiple times a day, particularly when Illustrator was also open. So far since unchecking this box I have had 0 problems. I would speculate its a bit of a niche problem potentially related to something third party like Mt Mograph Motion or Overlord otherwise more people would be losing their minds and reporting problems!

[pacey-j · Accepted solution]

The fix, uncheck the box

[Pixelmancer]

Hi pacey-j!
I've just rolled back to windows 10 for a similiar issue.
After Effects (and sometimes Premiere too) were crashing and sometimes freezing all my system.
After several seconds and a black screen on both monitors the systems became responsive again, but I've always needed to restart afterfx or reboot the system to keep working.
I'm using MtMograph Motion too, but after a fresh windows 11 install, with no plugins, AfterFX was crashing again.
May I ask you, you're using an AMD Ryzen 3000 series?
I've got 2 identical system in studio, both experiencing the same issue. The only fix I found was rolling back to 10, sadly, cause I like those shiny rounded corners of 11 o((>ω< ))o

[pacey-j]

Yes Ryzen 3900X here. Did you try the checkbox I've mentioned in this thread? It seemed to be the silver bullet for me!