Is GPU leveraged to render raster / shape layer previews?

[joel98689390]

Hi all! I'm planning to upgrade my underpowered, too-many-years-old GPU soon, but I'm wondering if I should do it sooner than later (like if it'll benefit me on the current project). 

I work mainly with layers imported from Illustrator, sometimes continuously rasterized, sometimes not, very oftentimes converted to shape layers for rigging and animating paths. My question is just this -  is the GPU leveraged for preview rendering shape layers, continuously rasterized layers, or other raster layers in general?  Or is the CPU responsible for that (or does the GPU come into play if motion blur is enabled on a layer)?  Adobe hasn't explained this particularly clearly yet in their docs; I understand a lot of effects are GPU-accelerated, but I'm not really interested in that at the moment.

[Mylenium]

Outside the actual drawing functions for the comp window none of this is GPU accelerated, so upgrading your hardware just for that won't do nothing.

Mylenium

[joel98689390]

Yeah... I was half expecting that was the case, but I'm still disappointed to hear that it is. Is there anything you might recommend for more robust responsiveness when working with vector layers?

A rant, as an aside: I mean, just what on earth does a person need to do to get more responsiveness from this application? I've got 32 gigs of RAM, a slightly overclocked 24 thread processor, three SSD hard drives to split up OS, media, and cache files, an NVMe drive just for good measure, etc... I've followed all the recommendations and thrown money at trying to speed up my work in After Effects, and it just feels like a money pit. The gains are always marginal at best. 

[Mylenium]

You answered your own question: A 24 core processor is not going to do anything or for that matter in most other "normal" programs, at least where user-interactive functions are concerened. AE is barely multithreaded overall and most UI code isn't in other programs, either. Your computer might make for a nice rendering machine in a 3D program and a suitable renderer/ render application, but won't do much for regular compositing, 3D modelling, scene layout and so on. outside that there realyl isn't a good way to optimize vector stuff since you need to chew throuw millions of point calculations. AE is obviously the worst of the lot, but you'd see similar performance degradation after a while in Illustrator, Corel Draw, 2D CAD programs like AutoCAD and whatever you can imagine.

Mylenium