AE CS3 and NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT Graphics card help

G

Genesis

Active member
Hello, I have an urgent question regarding After Effects CS3 and the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT512MB graphics card.

I just upgraded from a G5 to a Mac Pro Quad Core with 8gigs of DDR2 Ram and I’m running Leopard. I’m running a newly installed copy of After Effects CS3 with all the latest updates, I’m updating my old AE7 projects into AE CS3.

The problem I’m having is that AE CS3 is running painfully slow, I’m running very complex compositions but its running similar or slower then on AE7 on my G5. I generally just want to find out if anyone else has been using After Effects CS3 with the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT513MB graphics card and what their experiences have been. I’m just a little panicked that I may have ordered the wrong graphics card for this kind of heavy compositing work. Also if it turns out that I may be using a graphics card that may not be best suited for After Effects on MacPro’s is their another card that’s recommended?

A small note also, I’m running AE with multiprocessing enabled, I’m working in Adaptive Resolution, Open GL is disabled, I fudged around with the ram cache size but it’s still painfully slow. If anyone can chime in that would greatly be appreciated, I’m just panicking at the moment that I may have ordered the wrong graphics card.

Many Thanks in advance.
 
There have been all kinds of reports on the internets about that card with AE, etc. Problems and what not...so, might want to try a Google search and see what other's are experiencing and how they remedied the problem.

When we bought our new MacPro, I pulled the Nvidia and put in the new ATI Radeon 3800, which hasn't caused me any problems and works nicely.

Another note, multiprocessing is pretty slow when starting up previews etc. Also, if you don't have a ton of RAM it's not really worth it. 8GB's may seem like enough, but it recommends 2 gig's per core. I have 18 GB's in my machine and I work with it off until it comes time to render and with large memory hungry comps. Also, if you limit the number of cores MP uses it will help. Maybe drop it down to 2-4 cores instead of 8. Below is a link for a script called Throttle, which allows you to change how many cores AE uses with MP. Try turning it off too and see how it works then.

Also, what res are you working out? If it's HD you might want to try dropping the resolution to half or a third, even a quarter for huge comps. I generally work at half res and RAM previews set to skip every 1 frame. If I'm working on some type of animation where I need to see every frame, I'll switch it up, but most things you don't need to see every frame so you can save some memory. Essentially you're asking for only half the frames at half resolution, speeds things up immensely.

Ultimately with AE, you need to give some more info on what you're working on to get better answers...the general "it's slow" doesn't cut it to find out what's really wrong.

http://aescripts.com/throttle-11/
 
I don't have a ton of ram in my iMac, but I can testify to the fact that multiprocessing has been killing me for RAM previews. In the long run it's fast, but for short previews it is so sloooooooow to get revved up. I'd also recommend trying with it off, then turn it on for final renders as mentioned above...
 
I appreciate the help,

I did a preference hack switching down to 4 cores instead of 8. This seemed to help. I suppose it’s just a matter of finding that sweet spot in which after effects will run optimally for a specific comp.

I also tested a Radeon 3800 from a friends computer infact to see if the GeForce was causing problems, but AE seemed to run the same, so I figured it’s definitely not the root of any slowdowns. The only thing AE is still really sketchy with is if your working in Open GL and Adaptive resolution mixed, seems to be really buggy, I stay in adaptive resolution anyways .

Thanks again for the great feedback.

Cheers
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top