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M
MU!
Participating Frequently
July 21, 2025
Question

Encoder from Hardware to Software, everything!

  • July 21, 2025
  • 1 reply
  • 276 views

I'm writing to you today because I'm absolutely floored by the performance hit I've taken in After Effects (v25.3.2) since the latest update, combined with the NVIDIA driver (576.90). Seriously, my workflow has been thrown back to the Stone Age, and it's making my job incredibly difficult.

What used to take minutes now takes hours. It's like my NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 is no longer being utilized properly. Everything that isn't standard HD is being encoded by software, which is just ridiculously slow. And just to be clear, I'm not even using VBR 2-pass encoding; I'm sticking to single-pass! I'm now stuck rendering to Apple ProRes first, then converting that to MP4 (H.264), just to get anything done. This two-step process is eating up so much time, and it's simply unsustainable for my deadlines.

My rig is no slouch either: an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X, 64GB of RAM, and Windows 11. It's built for performance, and After Effects is currently bottlenecking everything.

This isn't just an inconvenience; it's genuinely hurting my ability to work. I need a fix, and fast. Can you please tell me what's going on with the forced software encoding for non-HD resolutions and how we can get my hardware acceleration back to where it should be? I'm hoping for a quick resolution to this major setback.

Thanks,

1 reply

nishu_kush
Community Manager
nishu_kushCommunity Manager
Community Manager
July 21, 2025

Hi there,

 

Really sorry that you're having issues when exporting your project in After Effects. Are you getting this issue on a specific project? For testing, can you create a new project and try to export? Are there any third-party plug-ins being used? Have you tried exporting using Media Encoder?

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


Thanks,
Nishu

M
MU!Author
Participating Frequently
July 25, 2025

Thank you! It is actually worse! I just opened Ae, imported some. EXR sequence. Added to Adobe Media Encoder, they are 1920 x 1080.  Changed Siftware to hardware, says that my machine can't do hardware rendering... This is ridiculous. What can I do? See attached.

M
MU!Author
Participating Frequently
July 29, 2025

Thanks for the screenshot. Looks like something is working as it should. Could you let me know the version of the GPU driver installed on your computer? Are there any updates available for Windows? Go to After Effects Preferences > Memory & Performance > GPU Information and share a screenshot.

Let me know.


Thanks,
Nishu


Hello,

Just updated this second Nvidia driver to version 577.00. Same problem. Latest Windows 11 update. Here are the screenshots.

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