**The Importance of CPU Cores and RAM Allocation for After Effects Workstations**

In today's world of computer graphics and video editing, having the right hardware can make all the difference in terms of performance and productivity. When it comes to Adobe After Effects workstations, two key factors that often come up in discussions are CPU cores and RAM allocation. In this article, we'll delve into the details of how these two factors impact performance and provide insights on how to optimize your setup for maximum efficiency.

**The Limitations of Hyper-Threading**

One common misconception is that hyper-threading, which allows multiple threads to be processed simultaneously on a single core, provides significant performance benefits. However, in the case of After Effects, this isn't always the case. The system's limitation lies not with the number of cores or threads available, but rather with how the CPU schedules those resources. When we rescheduled our CPU cores using the "Reserve CPU Cores" setting, we found that it prevented After Effects from being over-scheduled and lagging out the system. This suggests that while hyper-threading may not provide a significant performance boost in After Effects, it can still have an impact on how the system is utilized.

**The Importance of Physical Cores**

While hyper-threading may not be as effective in After Effects, physical cores are still essential for achieving optimal performance. By disabling cores manually within the computer's UEFI BIOS and observing the results, we found that performance improvements were noticeable even with fewer cores. This highlights the importance of having enough physical cores to handle demanding tasks. In our case, we were able to improve performance by using more physical cores, rather than relying solely on hyper-threading.

**Memory Allocation for After Effects Workstations**

When it comes to RAM allocation, there are general guidelines that have been established over the years. For most consumer-level workstations, 16 GB of RAM is considered sufficient for basic tasks such as video editing and playback. However, for more demanding applications like After Effects, where large projects require significant amounts of memory, allocating at least 32 GB or more of RAM can make a significant difference.

**The Law of Diminishing Returns**

While adding more RAM to your system may seem like the obvious solution to improving performance in After Effects, there is a point of diminishing returns. In our case, we found that increasing RAM from one gig per core to two gigs per core resulted in significant improvements. However, beyond that point, the law of diminishing returns kicks in, and further increases in RAM allocation did not yield proportionally greater gains.

**The Impact of Scratch Disks**

When working with large projects, using a scratch disk can be essential for preventing lag and improving performance. In our case, we found that using a RAM disk as our scratch disk improved the user experience by forcing Photoshop to write to RAM rather than relying on slower SSDs. However, this ultimately comes down to how big is your project and how much of it sits in memory.

**Conclusion**

In conclusion, when it comes to optimizing performance for After Effects workstations, having a good balance between CPU cores, RAM allocation, and storage speed is crucial. While hyper-threading may not provide significant benefits, physical cores are essential for achieving optimal performance. Memory allocation is also critical, with at least 32 GB recommended for most demanding applications. By understanding the limitations of each factor and making informed decisions about your setup, you can optimize your After Effects workflow for maximum efficiency.

**Additional Tips and Recommendations**

* Consider investing in a high-performance workstation with plenty of physical cores.

* Allocate at least 16 GB of RAM for basic tasks, but consider upgrading to at least 32 GB or more for demanding applications.

* Use a RAM disk as your scratch disk to improve performance when working with large projects.

* Make sure to regularly update your graphics card drivers and operating system to ensure optimal performance.

**Sponsor Spotlight**

We'd like to take a moment to thank our sponsor, Crunchyroll. As anime enthusiasts ourselves, we appreciate the importance of high-quality content and fast streaming. With their premium subscription offering, you can enjoy all of their content in beautiful HD, complete ad-free, and with professional subtitles. Plus, as a special offer for our viewers, use the link in the video description to get a free 30-day trial. Don't miss out on this amazing opportunity to binge-watch your favorite anime shows!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhow much ram should i get for my computer so many people ask the question and the only answer they can get from the in the no techies and i mean we've even done it here before is usually well how much are you planning to use get that much which is only useful if you know how much your workload requires for gamers it's relatively simple there's a number on the back of the box excuse me a digital information page because physical media but for content creators and our main focus is going to be on adobe creative cloud because that's what we use here between adobe's own system requirements and white papers and the numerous professionals on the message boards around the web there's no solid answer all we really hear is you need multiple fast storage locations more memory is good uh faster processors with more cores are good and video cards with like speed and memory capacity are good this has been the ongoing guidance with seemingly no consideration for recent technological changes in the shifting bottlenecks within pcs and workstations for years so as part of the process of designing the workstations for our editors to find the optimal cost to performance compromise for a given workload i asked edzel to run some benchmarks in premiere pro after effects and photoshop all the creative cloud 2014 versions to investigate the effect of more cpu cores more ram up to 128 gigs and varying storage solutions now i was half expecting scraps of paper with notes scribbled on them so that we could configure our workstations but what i actually got was a very detailed summary with useful charts that we'll publish separately on the linus tech tip site in the link in the video description for folks who want to read it but for those of you who prefer videos well we made a video about it too so watch on oh and mash that subscribe button if you haven't already because our x99 overclocking guide another great way of squeezing performance out of your hardware will be coming soon corsair gaming rgb keyboards feature precision cherry mx rgb key switches for 16.8 million color per key backlighting for virtually unlimited customization click now to learn more i'll start by introducing the test bench it's edzel's 12 core xeon e5 2697 based workstation with the same asus x79 deluxe motherboard that we use in all of our editing rigs two geforce gtx titans for accelerating 3d rendering a cooler master 1200 watt modular power supply a kingston 240 gig ssd and a wd one terabyte velociraptor for storage and normally 64 gigs of hyperx quad channel ram but to properly investigate the effects of memory on performance we needed more ram so we used eight 16 gig sticks of intelligent memory ecc ram huge thanks to memphis by the way for providing this to us for testing giving us a whopping 128 gigs of ram to either allocate to programs or use as a ram disk to see if we could use excess memory in the system to alleviate storage bottlenecks so our premiere pro investigation started with allocating memory to the program via the preferences menu and rendering out projects at 1080p and 4k resolution with x264 we used x264 because it was better optimized for multi-core processors which inherently utilizes more memory now remember that when we allocate memory to premiere that doesn't mean that's the amount of ram in the system but rather how much of what's in the system we can afford to allocate purely to premiere to play with so at 1080p we found that if you don't want to multitask on your machine while rendering eight gigs of system memory is likely to be fine there was no benefit to more ram beyond our lowest tested six gig allocation at 4k though the story changes somewhat our rad project render times improved by seven percent when we went from six gigs to 24 gigs of allocated memory flattening out significantly after that demonstrating that the conventional wisdom of more ram doesn't really help beyond a certain point continues to hold true but where that certain point is will depend on the type of projects you're working on and we found that our 4k prores renders benefited from up to 64 gigs of ram on windows 8 but not beyond for larger longer projects like movies you might end up needing more memory to keep things running smoothly while editing but render times still probably won't benefit much now since the usefulness of more ram falls off a cliff past 64 gigs that left us with ha another 64 gigs of ram to play around with in the system so we decided to see if we could utilize a ram disk as a scratch disk and okay yeah uh faster storage here doesn't actually do much sort of render times aren't improved but a separate physical drive for a scratch disk whether it's ram or or ssd especially ssd versus slower hard drives does improve the overall perceived system performance with more responsive playback faster file importing and faster project opening being some of the most noticeable benefits moving on to after effects our investigation changed somewhat to include both ram allocation and cpu core scaling since we couldn't find much information about either of these topics ram allocation in multi-processor rendering mode is a particularly confusing thing because adobe allows anywhere from one gig to six gigs with the caveat being that if you have too many cores for the amount of ram that you're trying to allocate per core in your system let's say you have a quad core cpu 16 gigs of ram and you go and try and allocate six gigs per core to total of 24 gigs derp the program supposedly simply won't use all of your cores in this case and on top of that it treats logical processors or hyper-threaded cores the same as physical ones so finding the balance here then is key the largest performance improvement from additional ram allocation was going from one gig per core to two gigs per core so in theory then we should ensure that we have at least 48 gigs of ram for a 12 core hyper-threaded after effects workstation but beyond that the law of diminishing returns should hit us pretty hard but then we noticed an interesting thing here and that was that even though our six gigs per core allocation should have required 144 gigs of system ram limiting us to 19 of our 24 threads theoretically cpu utilization still hovered around 99 even in this case so maybe hyper threaded cores really aren't affecting performance much which led us to our investigation into cpu cores and after effects performance we tackled this in two different ways first by using cpu scheduling to isolate our real course validating our hypothesis that hyper threading isn't really doing a whole lot in this case and then by disabling cores manually within the computer's uefi bios to see how performance is affected by more actual physical cores so in that case performance improvements from having more horses pulling the cart were immediately noticeable and while not linear still demonstrated excellent scaling now you might think then what is the point of the cpu scheduling setting then why even bother with it well edsel found that reserving cpu cores even though cpu usage by the system didn't change much prevented after effects from being over scheduled and lagging out the system and we'll wrap things up in photoshop where the objective was to determine how much memory we would need for manipulating and resizing very large images on a beefy workstation like this one and the answer is well really not a heck of a lot while four gigs of ram resulted in much lower performance than eight or more beyond eight gigs we didn't observe much of a difference but bear in mind that this will greatly depend on the size of your project and the history state setting so the project we used took 4.75 gigs of memory or scratch disk and you know the size of the project then of course greatly affects the memory usage of your actions so in our case while it's not something we can easily benchmark we did find that our ssd's performance was a bit of a bottleneck while opening projects or performing certain actions things we would have assumed adobe would try to do in memory first rather than relying on scratch so we did find that creating a ram disk as the scratch disk could improve the user experience by forcing photoshop to write to ram seven ssd but ultimately for raw performance it's just going to come down to how big is your project and how much of it sits in memory so that same old conclusion which i guess leads us to the rest of the conclusion in the last few years the general guidelines lots of processing cores lots of ram and fast storage haven't really changed and they didn't change but i still hope that this video for adobe creators anyway helped to clarify which of these things might have a bigger impact on them personally speaking of impact we have a brand new sponsor on linus tech tips today that might impact your anime consumption habits crunchyroll crunchyroll is obsessed with anime and was built by hardcore fans they have a massive selection of shows including the ever popular naruto shippuden attack on titan and sword art online and you can stream them on a variety of devices like your computer smartphone tablet apple tv or xbox their premium subscription which is only seven bucks a month or 6.95 excuse me it's very different allows you to stream all of their content completely ad free in beautiful hd and you can watch the latest current season episodes of shows like fate stay night with professional subtitles as soon as one hour after they air in japan but wait there's more crunchyroll is offering everyone in the linus tech tips audience a free 30-day trial if you visit our link crunchyroll.com linus so if you're serious about anime and want to binge on some of the biggest shows from japan head over to that link in the video description and start watching today guys like this video if you liked it dislike it if you thought it just sucked and leave a comment below letting us know actually i really want to hear what you guys thought of this video it's a little bit of a departure from our from our usual style a little bit more hardcore content creation as opposed to consumer thanks for watching guys oh yeah check out the link in the video description if you want to support us and help us make videos you can give us a monthly contribution buy a cool t-shirt like this one or just change your amazon bookmark to one with our affiliate code embedded in it so we get a small kickback whenever you buy more memory or cpu cores or faster storage thanks for watching and as always don't forget to subscribe youhow much ram should i get for my computer so many people ask the question and the only answer they can get from the in the no techies and i mean we've even done it here before is usually well how much are you planning to use get that much which is only useful if you know how much your workload requires for gamers it's relatively simple there's a number on the back of the box excuse me a digital information page because physical media but for content creators and our main focus is going to be on adobe creative cloud because that's what we use here between adobe's own system requirements and white papers and the numerous professionals on the message boards around the web there's no solid answer all we really hear is you need multiple fast storage locations more memory is good uh faster processors with more cores are good and video cards with like speed and memory capacity are good this has been the ongoing guidance with seemingly no consideration for recent technological changes in the shifting bottlenecks within pcs and workstations for years so as part of the process of designing the workstations for our editors to find the optimal cost to performance compromise for a given workload i asked edzel to run some benchmarks in premiere pro after effects and photoshop all the creative cloud 2014 versions to investigate the effect of more cpu cores more ram up to 128 gigs and varying storage solutions now i was half expecting scraps of paper with notes scribbled on them so that we could configure our workstations but what i actually got was a very detailed summary with useful charts that we'll publish separately on the linus tech tip site in the link in the video description for folks who want to read it but for those of you who prefer videos well we made a video about it too so watch on oh and mash that subscribe button if you haven't already because our x99 overclocking guide another great way of squeezing performance out of your hardware will be coming soon corsair gaming rgb keyboards feature precision cherry mx rgb key switches for 16.8 million color per key backlighting for virtually unlimited customization click now to learn more i'll start by introducing the test bench it's edzel's 12 core xeon e5 2697 based workstation with the same asus x79 deluxe motherboard that we use in all of our editing rigs two geforce gtx titans for accelerating 3d rendering a cooler master 1200 watt modular power supply a kingston 240 gig ssd and a wd one terabyte velociraptor for storage and normally 64 gigs of hyperx quad channel ram but to properly investigate the effects of memory on performance we needed more ram so we used eight 16 gig sticks of intelligent memory ecc ram huge thanks to memphis by the way for providing this to us for testing giving us a whopping 128 gigs of ram to either allocate to programs or use as a ram disk to see if we could use excess memory in the system to alleviate storage bottlenecks so our premiere pro investigation started with allocating memory to the program via the preferences menu and rendering out projects at 1080p and 4k resolution with x264 we used x264 because it was better optimized for multi-core processors which inherently utilizes more memory now remember that when we allocate memory to premiere that doesn't mean that's the amount of ram in the system but rather how much of what's in the system we can afford to allocate purely to premiere to play with so at 1080p we found that if you don't want to multitask on your machine while rendering eight gigs of system memory is likely to be fine there was no benefit to more ram beyond our lowest tested six gig allocation at 4k though the story changes somewhat our rad project render times improved by seven percent when we went from six gigs to 24 gigs of allocated memory flattening out significantly after that demonstrating that the conventional wisdom of more ram doesn't really help beyond a certain point continues to hold true but where that certain point is will depend on the type of projects you're working on and we found that our 4k prores renders benefited from up to 64 gigs of ram on windows 8 but not beyond for larger longer projects like movies you might end up needing more memory to keep things running smoothly while editing but render times still probably won't benefit much now since the usefulness of more ram falls off a cliff past 64 gigs that left us with ha another 64 gigs of ram to play around with in the system so we decided to see if we could utilize a ram disk as a scratch disk and okay yeah uh faster storage here doesn't actually do much sort of render times aren't improved but a separate physical drive for a scratch disk whether it's ram or or ssd especially ssd versus slower hard drives does improve the overall perceived system performance with more responsive playback faster file importing and faster project opening being some of the most noticeable benefits moving on to after effects our investigation changed somewhat to include both ram allocation and cpu core scaling since we couldn't find much information about either of these topics ram allocation in multi-processor rendering mode is a particularly confusing thing because adobe allows anywhere from one gig to six gigs with the caveat being that if you have too many cores for the amount of ram that you're trying to allocate per core in your system let's say you have a quad core cpu 16 gigs of ram and you go and try and allocate six gigs per core to total of 24 gigs derp the program supposedly simply won't use all of your cores in this case and on top of that it treats logical processors or hyper-threaded cores the same as physical ones so finding the balance here then is key the largest performance improvement from additional ram allocation was going from one gig per core to two gigs per core so in theory then we should ensure that we have at least 48 gigs of ram for a 12 core hyper-threaded after effects workstation but beyond that the law of diminishing returns should hit us pretty hard but then we noticed an interesting thing here and that was that even though our six gigs per core allocation should have required 144 gigs of system ram limiting us to 19 of our 24 threads theoretically cpu utilization still hovered around 99 even in this case so maybe hyper threaded cores really aren't affecting performance much which led us to our investigation into cpu cores and after effects performance we tackled this in two different ways first by using cpu scheduling to isolate our real course validating our hypothesis that hyper threading isn't really doing a whole lot in this case and then by disabling cores manually within the computer's uefi bios to see how performance is affected by more actual physical cores so in that case performance improvements from having more horses pulling the cart were immediately noticeable and while not linear still demonstrated excellent scaling now you might think then what is the point of the cpu scheduling setting then why even bother with it well edsel found that reserving cpu cores even though cpu usage by the system didn't change much prevented after effects from being over scheduled and lagging out the system and we'll wrap things up in photoshop where the objective was to determine how much memory we would need for manipulating and resizing very large images on a beefy workstation like this one and the answer is well really not a heck of a lot while four gigs of ram resulted in much lower performance than eight or more beyond eight gigs we didn't observe much of a difference but bear in mind that this will greatly depend on the size of your project and the history state setting so the project we used took 4.75 gigs of memory or scratch disk and you know the size of the project then of course greatly affects the memory usage of your actions so in our case while it's not something we can easily benchmark we did find that our ssd's performance was a bit of a bottleneck while opening projects or performing certain actions things we would have assumed adobe would try to do in memory first rather than relying on scratch so we did find that creating a ram disk as the scratch disk could improve the user experience by forcing photoshop to write to ram seven ssd but ultimately for raw performance it's just going to come down to how big is your project and how much of it sits in memory so that same old conclusion which i guess leads us to the rest of the conclusion in the last few years the general guidelines lots of processing cores lots of ram and fast storage haven't really changed and they didn't change but i still hope that this video for adobe creators anyway helped to clarify which of these things might have a bigger impact on them personally speaking of impact we have a brand new sponsor on linus tech tips today that might impact your anime consumption habits crunchyroll crunchyroll is obsessed with anime and was built by hardcore fans they have a massive selection of shows including the ever popular naruto shippuden attack on titan and sword art online and you can stream them on a variety of devices like your computer smartphone tablet apple tv or xbox their premium subscription which is only seven bucks a month or 6.95 excuse me it's very different allows you to stream all of their content completely ad free in beautiful hd and you can watch the latest current season episodes of shows like fate stay night with professional subtitles as soon as one hour after they air in japan but wait there's more crunchyroll is offering everyone in the linus tech tips audience a free 30-day trial if you visit our link crunchyroll.com linus so if you're serious about anime and want to binge on some of the biggest shows from japan head over to that link in the video description and start watching today guys like this video if you liked it dislike it if you thought it just sucked and leave a comment below letting us know actually i really want to hear what you guys thought of this video it's a little bit of a departure from our from our usual style a little bit more hardcore content creation as opposed to consumer thanks for watching guys oh yeah check out the link in the video description if you want to support us and help us make videos you can give us a monthly contribution buy a cool t-shirt like this one or just change your amazon bookmark to one with our affiliate code embedded in it so we get a small kickback whenever you buy more memory or cpu cores or faster storage thanks for watching and as always don't forget to subscribe you\n"