Wildly inconsistent render times

[spncrhly]

I've been working in after effects for 10+ years but as of recently, (the last year or so) I've been having insane performance issues. I was fed up to the point of buying a brand new, super powerful machine to help correct the issues of my old (also relatively powerful) machine, and yet, even on this new machine, I'm having massive issues.

Specs:

Intel i9 13900K

128 GB DDR-5600k RAM

RTX 4080

Separate M.2 System, Cache and Output drives.

It seems like it has to do with the newest version of AE, but I also get some issues when I work in a rolled back version. It shows itself in general performance issues throughout AE but the easiest one to talk about is render times for obvious reasons.

This is not limited to a single project but I'll use my current project as an example...I'm just trying to render 720 frames of a relatively simple UHD Comp to ProRes 4444 using trapcode particular. It is a sprite of a leaf falling and generating 10 particles/second. the sprite is 500x500 (I know it's big but using comps this big didn't used to cause issues, especially with this few particles.)

Sometimes this comp takes over an hour to render, sometimes it won't render a single frame, sometimes it renders 300 or so frames at a decent speed and then completely drops off and starts taking 10+ seconds per frame. In comparison, when I save a legacy version and render out of ae 2022, this comp takes 3 minutes to render. However, I've had the freezing issue in 2022 as well.

I would like to roll back to an even earlier version but of course adobe doesn't host the installers for anything earlier than 2022.

I've tried a million things to troubleshoot this over the last year but it just seems so completely unpredictable

It does seem to remedy the problem briefly if I restart my computer before I start a render, but this only works for one render or so and I can't just restart my computer every time I want to prerender a simple comp. also If I want to queue up multiple comps overnight, I can't trust AE to actually finish them.

Does anyone know wtf is going on? This is really unacceptable and I've started actively trying to find an alternative workflow that doesn't involve AE because I can't handle how unreliable it has become.

[spncrhly]

nothing from adobe support on this either?

[SiLi]

I feel your pain 😞
Do you have that problem only with projects using trapcode particular? Or also in other projects?

[spncrhly]

No it's in all projects, seems to happen randmly regardless of content of projects. Sometimes even in projects with a single layer of prores source footage, no effects or anything. literally a direct prores>prores encode to patch a small section or something.

[ToolfarmJP]

Would you mind your purchasing a third party tool like BG Render Max?

https://aescripts.com/bg-renderer/

[spncrhly]

I used mekajiki rendergarden for a long time in the past, and don't mind using something like that in most circumstances. However, this is basic functionality of the program that I would like to be working without third party solutions if I continue to give adobe $55/month for this license.

[djuncheg1]

New AE version probably not optimized and not tested at all. 

Im have 12700k/64gb/TopSSDs/4090 computer and for now work with render of many sequences from similar project (just change some assests). 

So, when im finished one render que and NOT close AE after that, just load same project and start render again - im have about 2x-3x longer render time or maybe more. Some times yes - its just stack forever on one frame with no reason. 

But if im close AE, just start it again and load this project again - its will render at normal speed. 

Im tried to clean cash etc - no any effect, its just not tested and optimized at all. Nobody work with this version before realise it. 

[spncrhly]

this is actually the most helpful information I have found yet on this issue... It seems like maybe it has to do with switching between many projects without closing AE.
This is problematic for me because I'm constantly shuffling multiple projects at once, so I really hope it gets resolved, but this at least gives me a small remedy.