Skip to content
Main Navigation Puget Systems Logo
  • Solutions
    • Content Creation
      • Photo Editing
        • Recommended Systems For:
        • Adobe Lightroom Classic
        • Adobe Photoshop
        • Stable Diffusion
      • Video Editing & Motion Graphics
        • Recommended Systems For:
        • Adobe After Effects
        • Adobe Premiere Pro
        • DaVinci Resolve
        • Foundry Nuke
      • 3D Design & Animation
        • Recommended Systems For:
        • Autodesk 3ds Max
        • Autodesk Maya
        • Blender
        • Cinema 4D
        • Houdini
        • ZBrush
      • Real-Time Engines
        • Recommended Systems For:
        • Game Development
        • Unity
        • Unreal Engine
        • Virtual Production
      • Rendering
        • Recommended Systems For:
        • Keyshot
        • OctaneRender
        • Redshift
        • V-Ray
      • Digital Audio
        • Recommended Systems For:
        • Ableton Live
        • FL Studio
        • Pro Tools
    • Engineering
      • Architecture & CAD
        • Recommended Systems For:
        • Autodesk AutoCAD
        • Autodesk Inventor
        • Autodesk Revit
        • SOLIDWORKS
      • Visualization
        • Recommended Systems For:
        • Enscape
        • Lumion
        • Twinmotion
      • Photogrammetry & GIS
        • Recommended Systems For:
        • ArcGIS Pro
        • Agisoft Metashape
        • Pix4D
        • RealityScan
    • AI & HPC
      • Recommended Systems For:
      • Data Science
      • Generative AI
      • Large Language Models
      • Machine Learning / AI Dev
      • Scientific Computing
    • More
      • Recommended Systems For:
      • Compact Size
      • Live Streaming
      • NVIDIA RTX Studio
      • Quiet Operation
      • Virtual Reality
    • Business & Enterprise
      We can empower your company
    • Government & Education
      Services tailored for your organization
  • Products
    • Puget Mobile
      Powerful laptop workstations
      • Puget Mobile 16″
    • Puget Workstations
      High-performance desktop PCs
      • AMD Ryzen
        • Ryzen 9000:
        • Small Form Factor
        • Mini Tower
        • Mid Tower
        • Full Tower
      • AMD Threadripper
        • Threadripper 7000:
        • Mid Tower
        • Full Tower
        • Threadripper PRO 7000WX:
        • Full Tower
      • AMD EPYC
        • EPYC 9004/9005:
        • Full Tower
      • Intel Core Ultra
        • Core Ultra Series 2:
        • Small Form Factor
        • Mini Tower
        • Mid Tower
        • Full Tower
      • Intel Xeon
        • Xeon W-2500:
        • Mid Tower
        • Xeon W-3500:
        • Full Tower
    • Custom Computers
    • Puget Rackstations
      Workstations in rackmount chassis
      • AMD Rackstations
        • Ryzen 9000:
        • R132-4U
        • R550-6U 5-Node
        • Threadripper 7000:
        • T121-4U
        • T120-5U
        • Threadripper PRO 7000WX:
        • T141-4U
        • T140-5U (Dual 5090s)
      • Intel Rackstations
        • Core Ultra Series 2:
        • C132-4U
        • Xeon W-3500:
        • X131-4U
        • X141-5U
    • Custom Rackmount Workstations
    • Puget Servers
      Enterprise-class rackmount servers
      • 1U Rackmount Servers
        • AMD EPYC:
        • E200-1U
        • Intel Xeon:
        • X200-1U
      • 2U Rackmount Servers
        • AMD EPYC:
        • E120-2U
        • E140-2U
        • Intel Xeon:
        • X240-2U
      • 4U Rackmount Servers
        • AMD EPYC:
        • E280-4U
        • E281-4U
    • Comino Grando GPU Servers
    • Custom Servers
    • Puget Storage
      Solutions from desktop to datacenter
      • Network-Attached Storage
        • Synology NAS Units:
        • 4-bay DiskStation
        • 8-bay DiskStation
        • 12-bay DiskStation
        • 4-bay RackStation
        • 12-bay FlashStation
      • Software-Defined Storage
        • Datacenter Storage:
        • 12-Bay 2U
        • 24-Bay 2U
        • 36-Bay 4U
    • Recommended Third Party Peripherals
      Curated list of accessories for your workstation
  • Publications
    • Articles
    • Blog Posts
    • Case Studies
    • HPC Blog
    • Podcasts
    • Press
    • PugetBench
  • Support
    • Contact Support
    • Onsite Services
    • Support Articles
    • Unboxing
    • Warranty Details
  • About Us
    • About Us
    • Careers
    • Contact Us
    • Enterprise
    • Gov & Edu
    • Our Customers
    • Press Kit
    • Puget Gear
    • Testimonials
  • Talk to an Expert
  • My Account
  1. Home
  2. /
  3. Hardware Articles
  4. /
  5. Adobe After Effects – NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Performance

Adobe After Effects – NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Performance

Posted on June 9, 2021 by Matt Bach
Always look at the date when you read an article. Some of the content in this article is most likely out of date, as it was written on June 9, 2021. For newer information, see Adobe After Effects - NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Performance

Table of Contents

  • Introduction
  • Test Setup
  • Raw Benchmark Results
  • Overall After Effects Performance Analysis
  • GPU Score Analysis
  • How well does the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti perform in After Effects?

TL;DR: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti 12GB performance in After Effects

For most users, After Effects is going to be CPU bottlenecked long before the performance of your GPU comes into play. But, if your workflow includes heavy use of GPU accelerated effects, the RTX 3080 Ti ties with the RTX 3090 as the fastest GPU we have tested for After Effects.

The price of the RTX 3080 Ti is certainly not cheap, however, and many users may opt to pay the extra $300 to go straight up to the RTX 3090 which has twice the VRAM (24GB vs 12GB). Even 12GB of VRAM is rarely necessary for After Effects, but with features like multi-frame rendering on the horizon that will likely increase the amount of VRAM you will want on higher-end machines, skipping the RTX 3080 Ti 12GB and going with the top-of-the-line RTX 3090 24GB is not a terrible idea if you have the budget for it.

Introduction

NVIDIA has a long history of releasing "Ti" variants of their products which in most cases are simply slight upgrades to the base model. With the recent launch of the RTX 3080 Ti (and RTX 3070 Ti), NVIDIA is continuing this trend. Compared to the base RTX 3080, the new RTX 3080 Ti has 2GB more VRAM (12GB versus 10GB) and 18% more CUDA cores, although the maximum boost clock is a bit lower. In fact, in terms of performance, the RTX 3080 Ti should be closer to the RTX 3090 than it is to the RTX 3080.

Ever since After Effects 2015.3, Adobe has been steadily adding support for GPU acceleration which has made the video card an increasingly important part of an After Effects workstation. However, most of After Effects is still limited by the performance of your CPU, which means that many users will stick with a relatively moderate GPU in order to spend more of their budget on their system's processor. And since having 12GB of VRAM won't be necessary for most After Effects workflows, this likely makes the RTX 3080 Ti complete overkill for After Effects, but the only way to know for sure is to test it to find out.

After Effects GPU Performance Benchmark - NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti 12GB
Image
After Effects GPU Performance Benchmark - NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti 12GB
Open Full Resolution

If you want to see the full specs for the latest NVIDIA GPUs we recommend checking out the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 Series product page. But at a glance, here are what we consider to be the most important specs:

VRAM Cores Boost Clock Power MSRP
RTX 3060 12GB 3,584 1.78 GHz 170W $329
RTX 3060 Ti 8GB 4,864 1.67 GHz 200W $399
RTX 3070 8GB 5,888 1.70 GHz 220W $499
RTX 3070 Ti 8GB 6,144 1.77 GHz 290W $599
RTX 3080 10GB 8,704 1.71 GHz 320W $699
RTX 3080 Ti 12GB 10,240 1.67 GHz 350W $1,199
RTX 3090 24GB 10,496 1.73 GHz 350W $1,499

As we noted earlier, the RTX 3080 Ti has 2GB more VRAM than the RTX 3080, and has close to the same CUDA core count as the RTX 3090. Price-wise, it is $500 more than the RTX 3080, or $300 less than the RTX 3090. On paper, it looks to be a great card for those that need high GPU performance, but not necessarily the large 24GB of VRAM that is found on the RTX 3090.

One concern we have is that this is a 350W card – just like the RTX 3090 – but uses a 2-slot cooler that is essentially the same as what is on the lower wattage RTX 3080. In our testing, this makes it both louder and hotter than any other RTX 3000 series card, which can be a significant concern if your system does not have adequate cooling.

CTA Image
After Effects Workstations

Puget Systems offers a range of powerful and reliable systems that are tailor-made for your unique workflow.

Configure a System!
CTA Image
Labs Consultation Service

Our Labs team is available to provide in-depth hardware recommendations based on your workflow.

Find Out More!

Test Setup

Listed below is the specifications of the system we will be using for our testing:

Test Platform
CPU AMD Ryzen 9 5950X 16-Core
CPU Cooler Noctua NH-U12AP
Motherboard Gigabyte X570 AORUS ULTRA
RAM 4x Crucial DDR4-3200 16GB (64GB total)
Video Card NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 24GB
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti 12GB
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 10GB
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 8GB
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti 8GB
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 12GB
Hard Drive Samsung 980 Pro 2TB
Software Windows 10 Pro 64-bit (19043)
After Effects 18.2
PugetBench for After Effects 0.93

*All the latest drivers, OS updates, BIOS, and firmware applied as of June 8th, 2021

To test each GPU, we will be using one of the fastest platforms currently available for After Effects – most notably the AMD Ryzen 5950X. Since After Effects utilizes the CPU so heavily, this should minimize the impact of the processor and allow each GPU to perform at its fullest potential. Even with this, however, be aware that there typically isn't much variation in performance between different video cards outside of very specific workloads.

For the testing itself, we will be using our PugetBench for After Effects benchmark. This tests a number of different projects and includes a dedicated "GPU Stress" test that is meant to put as much load on the GPU as possible while still staying within the realm of what someone might actually do in the real world. If you wish to run our benchmark yourself, you can download the benchmark and compare your results to thousands of user-submitted results in our PugetBench database.

Raw Benchmark Results

While we are going to go through our analysis of the testing in the next section, we always like to provide the raw results for those that want to dig into the details. If there is a specific task you tend to perform in your workflow, examining the raw results is going to be much more applicable than our more general analysis.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti 12GB After Effects GPU Performance Benchmark
Image
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti 12GB After Effects GPU Performance Benchmark
Open Full Resolution

Overall After Effects Performance Analysis

Since looking at GPU performance in applications like After Effects is often a case of examining extreme situations where the GPU is put under a heavy load, we first wanted to start off by looking at the overall performance we saw from our After Effects benchmark with each GPU. For most users, this is likely to be the most accurate representation of what they would experience in their day-to-day work since even if you use a ton of effects, they will usually be a mix of both CPU and GPU-based effects.

Gallery Image
Gallery Image
Gallery Image
Gallery Image
Gallery Image
Gallery Image
Gallery Image
Gallery Image
Previous Next
System Image
Gallery Image
Gallery Image
Gallery Image
Gallery Image
Previous Next

Looking at the Overall Score, there really isn't much to talk about. Since After Effects is primarily a CPU-limited application, all of the GPUs we tested scored within 2% of each other. That is well within the margin of error for this kind of real-world testing and indicates that for most workflows, you won't notice any difference between even an RTX 3060 and an RTX 3090.

However, many of our After Effects tests are very CPU bottlenecked, so to get a bit of a clearer idea of how these cards perform for straight GPU performance in After Effects, we will need to examine our "GPU Stress" project by itself which pushes the GPU as much as is realistic in After Effects.

GPU Score Analysis

After Effects GPU Effects benchmark performance NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti 12GB
Image
After Effects GPU Effects benchmark performance NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti 12GB
Open Full Resolution

Our GPU Score is calculated based on the performance of our "GPU Stress" composition which is designed to put as much load on the GPU as possible while minimizing the CPU as a bottleneck. This test is borderline synthetic since it is rare that you will only use GPU-accelerated effects, but it does a good job of showing the maximum performance delta between different GPUs in After Effects.

In this test, the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti performed right where we expected – above the RTX 3080 by about 5%, and essentially on par with the RTX 3090. That isn't much of a performance gain for the $500 higher price tag, but if you are looking for the best GPU to use for After Effects, the RTX 3080 Ti is a very solid choice since it is rare to need the 24GB of VRAM that is found on the RTX 3090.

How well does the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti perform in After Effects?

For most users, After Effects is going to be CPU bottlenecked long before the performance of your GPU comes into play. But, if your workflow includes heavy use of GPU accelerated effects, the RTX 3080 Ti ties with the RTX 3090 as the fastest GPU we have tested for After Effects.

The price of the RTX 3080 Ti is certainly not cheap, however, and many users may opt to pay the extra $300 to go straight up to the RTX 3090 which has twice the VRAM (24GB vs 12GB). Even 12GB of VRAM is rarely necessary for After Effects, but with features like multi-frame rendering on the horizon that will likely increase the amount of VRAM you will want on higher-end machines, skipping the RTX 3080 Ti 12GB and going with the top-of-the-line RTX 3090 24GB is not a terrible idea if you have the budget for it.

As always, keep in mind that these results are strictly for After Effects. If you have performance concerns for other applications in your workflow, we highly recommend checking out our Hardware Articles (you can filter by "Video Card") for the latest information on how a range of applications perform with the latest NVIDIA and AMD GPUs, as well as with different CPUs and other hardware.

CTA Image
After Effects Workstations

Puget Systems offers a range of powerful and reliable systems that are tailor-made for your unique workflow.

Configure a System!
CTA Image
Labs Consultation Service

Our Labs team is available to provide in-depth hardware recommendations based on your workflow.

Find Out More!

Related Content

  • Impact of PCIe 5.0 Bandwidth on GPU Content Creation Performance
  • NVIDIA 5060 Ti vs. AMD 9060 XT for Content Creation
  • NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Workstation Content Creation Review
  • Puget Mobile 16″ Laptop (2025) Product Showcase
View All Related Content

Latest Content

  • Impact of PCIe 5.0 Bandwidth on GPU Content Creation Performance
  • Network-Attached Storage Guide
  • NVIDIA 5060 Ti vs. AMD 9060 XT for Content Creation
  • Unreal Engine 5.6: Faster Open Worlds, Smoother Animation, Better ICVFX
View All
Tags: After Effects, NVIDIA, RTX 3060, RTX 3060 Ti, RTX 3070, RTX 3080, RTX 3080 Ti, RTX 3090

Who is Puget Systems?

Puget Systems builds custom workstations, servers and storage solutions tailored for your work.

We provide:

Extensive performance testing
making you more productive and giving better value for your money

Reliable computers
with fewer crashes means more time working & less time waiting

Support that understands
your complex workflows and can get you back up & running ASAP

A proven track record
as shown by our case studies and customer testimonials

Get Started

Browse Systems

Puget Systems Mobile Laptop Workstation Icon

Mobile

Puget Systems Tower Workstation Icon

Workstations

Puget Systems Rackmount Workstation Icon

Rackstations

Puget Systems Rackmount Server Icon

Servers

Puget Systems Rackmount Storage Icon

Storage

Latest Articles

  • Impact of PCIe 5.0 Bandwidth on GPU Content Creation Performance
  • Network-Attached Storage Guide
  • NVIDIA 5060 Ti vs. AMD 9060 XT for Content Creation
  • Unreal Engine 5.6: Faster Open Worlds, Smoother Animation, Better ICVFX
  • Unreal Fest 2025: Highlights from Orlando
View All

Post navigation

 MetaHumans – a look past the HypeAdobe Premiere Pro – NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti Performance 
Puget Systems Logo
Build Your Own PC Site Map FAQ
facebook instagram linkedin rss twitter youtube

Optimized Solutions

  • Adobe Premiere
  • Adobe Photoshop
  • Solidworks
  • Autodesk AutoCAD
  • Machine Learning

Workstations

  • Content Creation
  • Engineering
  • Scientific PCs
  • More

Support

  • Online Guides
  • Request Support
  • Remote Help

Publications

  • All News
  • Puget Blog
  • HPC Blog
  • Hardware Articles
  • Case Studies

Policies

  • Warranty & Return
  • Terms and Conditions
  • Privacy Policy
  • Delivery Times
  • Accessibility

About Us

  • Testimonials
  • Careers
  • About Us
  • Contact Us
  • Newsletter

© Copyright 2025 - Puget Systems, All Rights Reserved.