Slow preview in AE with Dell 7820 and Nvidia Quatro RTX 5000

[Laurence M]

Hi, AE takes a long time to preview. The configuration of my computer is recommended by Adobe. It's much slower than on my much less powerful laptop. I have activated the AE settings also recommended by Adobe (Mercury GPU acceleration, texture memory, disk cache size and others) and updated the graphics card drivers to version 511.09. However, no improvement. It's worse with the latest version of AE. Has anyone encountered this problem and resolved it? Thanks you.

(Dell Precision 7820, Intel Xeon 4216 processor, 48GB / NVIDIA Quatro RTX 5000 graphics card, 15,74Go)

[davidarbor]

Unfortunately, there's not enough information to go on here. Are you saying the same project is faster on your laptop? Are you running the same version of After Effects on both? Are you using After Effects 2022 with multi-frame rendering enabled?

Can you disable layers until things speed up to find out if one specific effect or layer is causing the problem?

Is your comp in 32-bpc, do you have motion blur turned on, did you accidentally switch to the Cinema 4D renderer? 

These are all things that could slow your project down, but without screenshots or more info on the project it's impossible to say what's going on. 

[Laurence M]

Thank you for your answer. I tested the same animation on the desktop and on the laptop with the AE 18.0.1 version: I empty the disk cache and I launch the preview. The desktop computer I just bought takes 1 hour to preview the project, the laptop 40 minutes.
The desktop is in 8 bpc color and not 32. No motion blur, no 4d rendering. I tested different texture memory values, with no significant difference in speed. I rather have the impression that the GPU is not working at its maximum...

[davidarbor]

Well that's most definitely the case. After Effects doesn't use the GPU the same way that Premiere, Resolve, or a 3D GPU renderer do. Much of the processing happens on the CPU, although more tasks are being handled by the GPU in the latest versions of AE. Is there a reason you're using AE 18? I strongly recommend giving AE 22 with multi-frame rendering a go. This will instantly make your projects much, much faster as AE can now take much, much better advantage of your resources. I've seen 2-4x speed improvements on my projects.  

As for why your laptop is faster, my guess is that you have a Core i7 or Core i9 in it with a faster single-core clock speed than your Xeon does.

[Laurence M]

I regret not knowing that Core i7 or Core i9 is faster than Xeon. I followed adobe's advice for buying Dell fixed computers. The performance comparison is not given between fixed and laptop configurations. The fixed computer I bought cost more than twice as much as the laptop...
I started the project with version 18, I prefer to continue because I tested version 22 and the preview time is much longer. The multi-image rendering is still enabled, only 10% is reserved for other applications.

[davidarbor]

There's not much I can tell you then. The only thing that's going to make a massive performance difference is by upgrading to AE 2022, anything else you do is going to make a difference of seconds. Your Xeon will be very well used in AE 2022; your GPU will also see higher utilization. I recommend going back and troubleshooting the problem there. AE 2022 is much, much faster than previous versions and if you're fnding it slower, then there's likely an issue that can either be solved by finding a problematic layer or effect. AE 2022 also has a new feature called the Composition Profiler which is really fantastic. This feature will tell you how long it takes to render a current frame or effect and will very easily let you track down performance bottlenecks in your composition.