after effects performance

[stefmesman]

i got the new high end mbp. 2.2Ghz, 1gb gpu, i7 SB, 8gbram

ive got multicore rendering enabled on after effects, still when i start a render it goes up to 40% usage of all cores. but then after like 10 seconds backs down to only 15% and takes ages to render anything out.

my virtual cores are only sometimes actually doing anything. Sometimes i hear the fans kicking in and then for about 5 seconds it runs on full speed. This happes mostly when AE is not doing anything intensive. im using cs5. why cant it take up atleast 80% of my processors? what is the bottleneck here? There is 1gb ram free.

 

[CaptainChunk]

After Effects CS5.x's multiprocessing performance bottlenecks easily on RAM. Ideally, you want around 1-3GB per logical core (not kidding) dedicated to the app for optimal rendering performance. How much you would want to assign per core will depend largely on the complexity of your compositions (frame size, number of layers, etc.).

AE also forces you to reserve at least 1.5GB of your RAM to other processes outside of it (namely, your OS and its related system processes). So on an 8GB machine, it has up to 6.5GB to play with. Additionally, AE requires at least 0.75GB of RAM per enabled logical core as a bare minimum.

AE CS5 is easily the biggest memory pig installed on my machine. It made me want to upgrade to 16GB (which I did recently). And it still wants more RAM.