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iCartoonist
New Participant
May 9, 2019
Question

Adobe Animate Low Performance Lag on 4K Display

  • May 9, 2019
  • 8 replies
  • 3885 views

Looking for help with Adobe Animate CC 2019's general performance. I recently upgrade to a 4K tablet display (Cintiq Pro) on my 2013 Mac Pro. Animate's performance now slows down when working fullscreen. Basic tasks like moving a simple circle with outline has a stutter as the object is dragged across the screen. Timeline playback is even worse. Recently completed a 24FPS project using an older 21" Cintiq (1280 x 1024 resolution) on the same Mac Pro and the timeline previews were fine (camera moves and all). Opening the exact same files today at full screen and the frame rate drops to 7FPS (and sometimes lower).

If I resize the entire app's window down significantly (like 1/3 to 1/4 of my screen space), the frame rate and performance boost back to normal.

I have tried the VIEW -> PREVIEW MODE -> FAST setting, but this has no affect.

I have also tried setting the app to "Open in Low Resolution" via Finder/Get Info.

The same issues exist in Adobe Animate 2018.

Performance in other Adobe apps (ex. Photoshop) show no performance issues when working fullscreen. No issues with other non-Adobe apps working fullscreen either. It is ONLY Adobe Animate that is showing performance lag.

Again, the only change has been to the display's size/resolution. It seems like Adobe Animate CC simply doesn't utilize GPU hardware acceleration, or is not compatible for 4K/Retina work... at least, using the app in full screen.

Any suggestions/solutions would be appreciated!

    This topic has been closed for replies.

    8 replies

    C
    crispe123
    Known Participant
    November 1, 2022

    It's because Animate is still based on the tired old bloated corpse of Flash. They keep stapling on new features to this really old program framework when it really needs a rebuild for modern technology. The Preferences panel for example has bugger all options in it, and it's been like that since I started using it 15-20 years ago. It hasn't worked properly above 1920x1080 resolution for me for a long time. I'd love to come back and use it (I do all my animation in After Effects) because of all the rigging stuff but I can't see them ever rebuilding it. And don't get me started on how poor the shape interpolation remains when After Effects is leaps and bounds ahead.

      B
      burbeee
      Participating Frequently
      November 1, 2022

      Credit where credit is due. After contacting Adobe about this directly a few times, I've found that there is some genuine improvement on this front with version 23.0, at least on my computer. It's not perfect, it still slows down if there's a whole bunch of keyframes in a row on 1s, but it is much better. I hope Adobe continues to address this problem until it no longer exists, but I do appreciate that there seems to have been a push to better the product. Thanks.

      kglad
      kglad
      Community Expert
      November 1, 2022

      i recently encountered a significant performance degradation in a html5 project when using the moveTo and CurveTo methods that was dependent on screensize.  this baffled me for quite a while because performance was terrific on my iphone and terrible using a work-horse pc with far superior specs (and 42" monitor). 

       

      my project was using scale-to-fit settings and that caused a problem on the 42inch monitor.

       

      i only discovered the cause when deciding to add some timer code and console.log outpute to see if i could isolate the problem.  when bringing up the developer console (thereby scaling to fit a smaller screen), i noticed perfomance improved dramatically

      B
      burbeee
      Participating Frequently
      June 15, 2022

      Would really like to know if anyone at Adobe is going to address this issue like, ever. Or even acknowledge it. Or reply with something other than "update to the next version." 

        J
        jamesr66044184
        Participating Frequently
        June 16, 2022

        A price increase is probably the only thing we can guarantee from Adobe

          _keyframer
          _keyframer
          Community Expert
          January 27, 2022

          A 2013 Macbook Pro is quite old by todays' standards. I'd suspect it doesn't meet minimum system specs anymore.

          Animator and content creator for Animate CC
          J
          jamesr66044184
          Participating Frequently
          January 27, 2022

          This issue is happening exclusively on my 5k 2019 Imac.  

          B
          burbeee
          Participating Frequently
          January 11, 2022

          I want to mention something I've come to realize on the offchance this be listened to. It's that basically 99% of the problem here seems to be with UI elements, not the complexity of the animation itself. I can be playing some thing with multiple layers of characters and backgrounds, and it'll chug...until I collapse the timeline with the View Only Active Layer button. It'll play at the correct framerate then. It's annoying, but it does the trick, at least on my rig. Just by quite literally hiding the amount of keyframes displayed.

          People have been saying over and over again about different ways to open up the program with lower resolution, playing the animation itself on a lower resolution screen, etc. But I can't accept the fact that Animate doesn't work out of the box in higher resolution screens. That's completely bonkers. It's no way to work. Animation is all about timing, and if you can't judge your correct timing at every moment, you're going to slow down the process immensely.

          I'm hoping that you folks at Adobe knowing the UI itself is causing some problems will help to alleviate the problem.

            J
            jamesr66044184
            Participating Frequently
            January 27, 2022

            I'd like to chime in here and add that even a primitive line animation on a white background is lagging severely on my 5k Imac display.

             

            I just upgraded and it's attrocious trying to watch the film play inside the program.

             

            Like you said, it's not even that complex or dynamic of an animation and yet it lags like I'm rendering 3D assets that were irresponsibly tossed onto the timeline for maximum lag.

             

            This isn't even the only issue with Animate, on my last machine Animate just up and stopped being able to compress image assets, essentially becoming a new feature that doesn't work so I just don't even bother with it anymore.

             

            These are the kinds of attributes I'd associate with a freeware animation software, not an expensive sub service one.  And adobe wonders why people want CS back.

            N
            Nick Gioia
            Community Expert
            November 5, 2021

            Upgrade to adobe Animate 22.0.

            B
            burbeee
            Participating Frequently
            November 5, 2021

            I've updated Animate every single time there's been an update, hoping that the team would have made a fix by now. I'm running 22 right now and having the exact same problem that people have been complaining about since at least 2018. Updating doesn't help unless the folks at Adobe choose to actually fix the problem here. It's 2021, 4K screens are everywhere. There isn't a single art program I've used that has this kind of problem, including freeware ones. 

            I cannot comprehend why resources are being poured into things like Character Animator and the animation capabilities in Fresco when you already have an animation program that you're basically leaving out to die. Adobe, you bought Macromedia fifteen years ago. And Animate has barely adapted to the landscape to meet the needs of artists. It's still Flash. It's the same program I learned well over a decade ago, and painfully, runs worse than it used to on a modern platform. 

            I'm not hoping for a fix anymore, I've honestly given up. There's a lot of reasons artists have flocked to other programs, and this is one of them. 

              B
              burbeee
              Participating Frequently
              September 14, 2020

              I recently bought the same Cintiq and am having the same problem. I didn't realize this could possibly be an issue until now. I've seen multiple people complain about this lag, and it's not gotten any better in Animate 2020. How has this not been solved yet, it's completely irresponsible. 

                B
                burbeee
                Participating Frequently
                May 10, 2021

                Hey Animate team, this issue about GPU acceleration has been brought up on multiple threads over the course of at least three years. Each time it's met with no response. I can find one from 2018 in which you responded "we'll look into it," and then the conversation died. 

                 

                https://community.adobe.com/t5/animate/animate-cc-hardware-acceleration-performance/td-p/10177151


                It's 2021. 4K screens are everywhere. It's completely ridiculous that your flagship animation program, the one you literally call "ANIMATE" now, completely inhibits the ability to animate on a screen of this resolution. Timing is everything in animation. If I'm working on a very lightweight scene, and I cannot accurately see my work play out at 24 FPS, I cannot judge my work with any degree of accuracy. 

                There is at least THREE YEARS of people complaining about this issue. Flash animators have put up with a lot over the years, but inability to play a scene with any degree of timing accuracy completely shoots your users in the foot. 

                  tommyVF400293
                  tommyVF400293
                  New Participant
                  November 4, 2021

                  Much agreed.

                   

                  However, a fix that was possible until Adobe Animate 2022:

                   

                  Open the info window on the app itself, Adobe Animate 2021. Under "General" there was a box you could tick off saying "open in low resolution", which turned the Animate interface/content to not-retina, causing it to run / perform smoothly and not stutter / lag. BUT that's not a possibility anymore as I can see, at least.

                   

                  Help, anyone?

                  Y
                  YG66888
                  New Participant
                  June 8, 2019

                  对，我也在AN上遇到了同样的问题，而且也只有AN有问题，AE\AI 都没有此类问题，就连菜单都模糊不清楚

                  我用的是BENQ 4K 32英寸显示器

                  别人有类似情况吗~

                  kglad
                  kglad
                  Community Expert
                  June 8, 2019

                  message 1 says:

                  Yes, I also encountered the same problem on AN, and only AN has problems, AE\AI has no such problems, even the menu is blurred. I am using a BENQ 4K 32-inch display Do people have a similar situation~

                    M
                    MrScottyPieey
                    New Participant
                    November 4, 2019

                    English please I only speak English this is chineses I don't understand the language.

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