GPU and GPU driver requirements for After Effects

New GPU chipsets are constantly being introduced, and the After Effects team does not qualify or recommend individual GPU chipsets. However, here are some guidelines to get the best GPU for your workflow.

• Individual GPU technologies are less important than overall GPU performance. After Effects supports DirectX, OpenCL, CUDA, and Metal to varying degrees. Choose a high-performance card that meets your individual budget and system needs.
• Premiere Pro utilizes the GPU more broadly than After Effects, and its technology is shared with After Effects. The list of recommended GPUs for Premiere Pro is a good place to start. Go through the Premiere Pro system requirements.
  
• Other applications in your workflow may have a GPU requirement that is higher than After Effects. Take all of them into consideration.
• Check if you have Multiple GPUs on the same machine.
• Check if you have unsupported GPUs on your Mac machine.

GPU-related issues you may face

After upgrading to After Effects version 17.x or later, there may be driver issues, and you may need to upgrade your driver.

Some of the driver issues that you could face are:

• System incompatibilities are known to cause instability and crashes that lead to data loss.
• The current version of your network device software may cause issues with your Adobe application.
• Intermittent crash while editing.
• You can get error messages such as - "This version of your operating system is incompatible with your Adobe application."
• No previews, garbled previews, frame drops, or performance issues, including slow playback or frame glitches. 

NVIDIA CUDA graphics acceleration requirements

NVIDIA CUDA graphics acceleration requires CUDA 11.8 or newer drivers. CUDA isn't a requirement for running Adobe video apps. Still, if you prefer CUDA graphics acceleration, you must have drivers compatible with CUDA 11.8 (522.25 or newer) installed on your system before upgrading to the latest Premiere Pro versions. CUDA drivers are included with the latest NVIDIA Studio Drivers.

Updating NVIDIA Drivers on Windows

You can run Premiere Pro with the latest GeForce series GPUs or RTX/Quadro series GPUs.

These drivers are updated regularly, so check the NVIDIA website to be sure you have the most current version for your GPU.

You can find the latest GPU drivers here.

Apple Metal GPU acceleration

Adobe supports those versions of Windows and macOS that are still actively supported by Microsoft and Apple. For macOS, that typically means the three most recent versions.

You may check if a system update is available for macOS to check for any new graphics driver updates.

Intel GPU driver update requirements

After Effects requires a recent version of the Intel graphics driver. To avoid stability and performance issues, your Intel driver version must be 27.20.100.8476 or later. 

Adobe recommends you try to obtain a compatible driver from your computer manufacturer. Intel makes a generic version available on its website if a compatible version is unavailable.

Adobe highly recommends backing up your system first if you've difficulty installing the driver.

After Effects features that use GPU

Features natively available in After Effects

A host of After Effects features use GPU to accelerate rendering. Select Project Settings > Video Rendering and Effects to view the GPU-accelerated effects.

Third-party effects

Some third-party effects, like Element 3D by Video Copilot use the GPU independently of After Effects. Refer to the documentation from the publisher for guidance on what GPUs and technology are supported. Effects such as Magic Bullet Looks, hook into the Mercury GPU Acceleration pipeline (such effects are also GPU-accelerated in Premiere Pro).

Mercury GPU Acceleration

Mercury GPU Acceleration allows After Effects to render supported effects using the GPU, which can significantly improve render time.

You may recognize the Mercury name from Premiere Pro. After Effects uses the same technology that Premiere Pro Mercury Playback Engine uses for rendering. (The playback engine in After Effects is otherwise different from Premiere Pro, so After Effects only uses the rendering component of that technology.)

Mercury GPU Acceleration is a project setting. To enable it, select File > Project Settings, select the Video Rendering and Effects tab, and set the Use option to Mercury GPU Acceleration. Depending on your computer and GPU, you may see multiple such options. After Effects supports the following GPU technologies:

• OpenCL (Windows only, with an AMD or Intel GPU)
• CUDA (Windows only, with an NVIDIA GPU)
  
• Metal (macOS only, 10.12 and later)

More information about GPU

• All VR effects, such as VR Blur, only work on the GPU. Unlike the other effects, they don't currently have a CPU fallback. We recommend a GPU with high VRAM, 4GB or better, to use these effects. Their advantage for VR over other effects is that they are seamless and wrap the ends of the VR image together. Also, some of them are useful on non-VR footage because they are wholly new to After Effects, like VR Chromatic Aberrations.
• The Hardware Accelerate Composition, Layer, and Footage Panels option in Preferences > Display is enabled by default and uses DirectX on Windows and Metal on Mac to prepare the rendered frames for screen display during previews or playback. Once After Effects renders the frame, it next prepares that frame for display, taking into account the screen resolution, scaling, overlays like guides and layer handles, and color management. Specifically, View > Use Display Color Management when a working space color profile has been enabled for the project. When the Hardware Accelerate option is disabled, After Effects processes all of that on the CPU, but the GPU can accelerate this process, especially color management. The GPU requirement for this is very low, and any modern video card with a small amount of VRAM is adequate.