After Effect Render time on EC2

[tal5FDB]

I'm running After Effects 2020 on a remote server running Windows Server 2016. It's an AWS EC2 g3 instance with an NVIDIA Tesla M60 and 30GB of RAM

The render speed from AE seems very slow, much slower than my middle of the road laptop with no dedicated GPU and a mediocre CPU.

When opening task manager to check my resource usage, I can't even see the GPU listed there so I'm under the impression that the server is not utilising the GPU at all. As far as I can tell, the NVIDIA Grid drivers are installed correctly on the machine.

Any ideas for what could be causing slow performance and how to improve it?

[Martin_Ritter]

AE runs on CPU mainly, only some effects and 3rd party plugins use GPU at all.

Server CPUs (mostly Xeon) are far from being an ideal solution for AE, because of the very low clock speed per core. AE needs very high single core performance in order to run potential as fast as possible.

Good hardware choice starts at 4GHz per core, higher is better.

You might can overcome this limitation a bit by using command line renderer (aerender.exe) and launch it in parallel for different render ranges. However, each process needs it own space in RAM, therefore you won't get far with only 30GB.

Have a look at RenderGarden, RenderBoss or some of the others, or start to write your own manager.

*Martin

[tal5FDB]

thank you

do we still need to choose a server with GPU?

[Mylenium]

AE barely does even use the GPU. You simply booked the wrong server. It might help if you looked up those gigazillion "How to optimize performance?" threads here on this forum and elsewhere to get an idea how this stuff works.

Mylenium

[tal5FDB]

thanks

but should we choose a server with no GPU? will it still work AE?