GPU Support in After Effects is NOT HAPPENING

[HNS2000]

Hi Guys,

So I have currently purchased a NVIDIA Geforce 3090RTX Graphics Card (MSI Suprim X). I have updated all the drivers and I am running on a Windows 10 (updated) Machine. 

Of course I figured: great! My renders are gonna be liquid fast now and enable GPU rendering via Project Settings. Also when I look into preferences I get all the major details about my graphics card.

But when I ram preview and analyse the usage of the graphics card I get maximum 20% gpu ram usage and no usage or only 4%-9% on the GPU Core. 

Now, wouldnt you figure as a graphics oriented program in 2021 and after effects supposedly supporting gpu capacity since the last maybe 16 years, at least, that is what Adobe is telling us more or less, that After Effects would up to now be able to be using at least tiny bits of the performance offered by the hardware? 

Could it be that I am configuring my After Effects wrong? although there are only 2 settings in the program to set up GPU yes or no...

Customer support did also not help in this issue up to now.

Anybody?

Kind Regards,

Hannes

[Mylenium]

Nothing wrong. You simply have wrong expectations and, without meaning to be snarky, should have informed yourself beforehand how limited AE's GPU acceleration is and where and when it is specifically used. If you really bought the card just for AE, then you have wasted a lot of money for nothing, even more so, since pretty much all professional commercial programs usually are 6 to 12 months behind in even properly supporting new cards. Outside that the usual things apply: AE is a complex program that allows different workflows by combining features differently, so performance optimization hinges on way more than buying a beefy GPU. A suitablke CPU, enough RAM, good harddrives and so on also matter and it all needs to be balanced to a certain extent. Slow disks can hinder footage I/O on the fastest processors and just in the opposite direction, fast GPUs and multi-core CPUs don't mean much when you consider that most workflows in AE are not parallelized and barely multithreaded. There's literally thousands of posts on these things here on this forum. A more specific description of your setup and what you expect might help to advise, but overall you just need to get used to these limitations. 99% of stuff in AE is far from realtime and many workflows are just clunky.

Mylenium

[HNS2000]

Hey Mylenium, thanks for the advice, but this answer was not very helpful as it is blaming me, the user, the client, the customer. of course I have not only bought my GPU for faster AE-Performance. I've been using AE for 20 years now and I know pretty much all of what you are referring to speed up the software. My comment went into an obvious direction: when can we expect GPU-support for After Effects?

[David Arbor]

As Mylenium said, and as you know after being a user for 20 years, AE is more complex than "flip the GPU switch to find optimization and performance gains." There are many GPU-accelerated effects already with more being re-written for the GPU each year, but that only matters so much when the majority of the software runs CPU-based tasks. Passing frames from the CPU to the GPU and back to the CPU can be a slow process, so even the order of your effects stack can make a difference, but nothing that would make your GPU utilization jump to a sizeable percentage.

If you're not familiar with current development situation, the AE team is in the middle of a multi-year rewrite of AE's architecture to enable true multi-frame rendering. This has been available to test in the public beta for a couple months now (you can read more here and here and performance improvements are coming frequently. In fact, recently, some major features that were added were Speculative Preview, and just last week another nice feature was added to increase performance by dynamically adjusting the amount of frames that can be rendered at once, as opposed to a fixed number all the time.

This is where the focus of AE's development efforts are right now, as they should be, and I can only imagine the future of AE's rendering is a hybrid of CPU and GPU, but the GPU alone can't completely support AE, so the main infrastructure needs to catch up and be modernized. I've already seen 3x - 4x rendering improvements in some projects using multi-frame rendering, so I recommend you take a look at the public beta. You can install it and other public betas from the left side ("Beta Apps" category) of the Creative Cloud Desktop app. These can be installed alongside the public versions without causing any issues since they get their own sets of preferences. For the most part you can even go back and forth with your project from public release to beta, so if you want, you can work on your project in AE 2021 and then render in AE Beta (this is not currently the case for Premiere, though).

[HNS2000]

Hi davidarbor,

Thank you for taking the time to elaborate. Yes, I have gathered information about the multiframe-support approach and frankly I havent tried this beta yet, but heard many good things about this development. I can see that its a challenge and that AE is much bigger than flicking a "go-GPU"-Switch... I just remembered around 2005 when CUDA-Support was such a big thing - and then 16 years later we still cannot see significant GPU-Usage in the Software. Also in this day and age where every motion grapher packs heat with multiple Graphics Cards in the multi-thousands dollars it be greatly appreciated to put this power to the core and not just having an alibi-gpu-switch. 

Upgrading to 128GB of ram greatly improved my setup, also putting the caches to two different M.2s helped a big deal.
Excited for the new developments - will put it to the test...

Thanks guys