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
        • RealityCapture
    • 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)
        • EPYC 9004:
        • E140-4U (Quad 4090s)
      • Intel Rackstations
        • Core Ultra Series 2:
        • C132-4U
        • Xeon W-3500:
        • X131-4U
        • X141-5U
    • Custom Rackmount Workstations
    • Puget Servers
      Enterprise-class rackmount servers
      • Rackmount Servers
        • AMD EPYC:
        • E200-1U
        • E120-2U
        • E140-2U
        • E280-4U
        • E281-4U
        • Intel Xeon:
        • X200-1U
        • X240-2U
    • 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
    • Puget Gear
      Quality apparel with Puget Systems branding
  • Publications
    • Articles
    • Blog Posts
    • Case Studies
    • HPC Blog
    • Podcasts
    • Press
    • PugetBench
  • Support
    • Contact Support
    • Support Articles
    • Warranty Details
    • Onsite Services
    • Unboxing
  • About Us
    • About Us
    • Contact Us
    • Our Customers
    • Enterprise
    • Gov & Edu
    • Press Kit
    • Testimonials
    • Careers
  • Talk to an Expert
  • My Account
  1. Home
  2. /
  3. Hardware Articles
  4. /
  5. How Fast is the new Multi-Frame Rendering in After Effects 18.1 BETA?

How Fast is the new Multi-Frame Rendering in After Effects 18.1 BETA?

Posted on March 10, 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 March 10, 2021. For newer information, see How Fast is the new Multi-Frame Rendering in After Effects 18.1 BETA?

Table of Contents

  • Introduction
  • Test Setup
  • Starting off with the good!
  • Still a few rough spots to work out…
  • Will this change what CPU is best for After Effects?
  • How well does Multi-Frame Rendering work in After Effects BETA?

TL;DR: How well does Multi-Frame Rendering work in After Effects BETA?

Overall, we are very impressed with the upcoming Multi-Frame Rendering feature in After Effects. It is still in BETA with many features yet to come, but in our early testing, performance improvements of 1.5-2x are not uncommon, and in certain situations, we saw more than a 3x improvement in render times. There are certainly still kinks for Adobe to work out (hence why it is in beta), but as the first iteration of this feature, it is very, very good.

Introduction

In the After Effects BETA that became available this morning (3/10/2021), Adobe has added a new feature called "Multi-Frame Rendering". This feature is still very much in development but dramatically increases After Effect's ability to utilize processors with higher core counts. At the moment, it is just for rendering (exporting), although Adobe has noted that support will expand to composition preview in the coming months.

If you want more information on how this feature works, Adobe has a terrific Blog Post and FAQ that we highly recommend checking out. They are touting performance gains of 1.2x to 3x depending on the specs of your system – which is what we want to examine in this post. Adobe is helpfully providing a test project to use as a benchmark, but we will also use our normal PugetBench for After Effects benchmark as the test project is likely a "best-case scenario" in order to show off this new feature.

Multi-Frame Rendering is still in BETA. We fully expect performance to change as Adobe works out the bugs and improves this feature over time. This article is meant as a first look or preview of how it may affect straight performance, as well as what CPUs we recommend in our After Effects workstations once it hits release.

Multi-Frame rendering in After Effects 18.1 BETA
Image
Multi-Frame rendering in After Effects 18.1 BETA
Open Full Resolution

We ended up over-doing our testing a bit and ended up looking at 9 different CPUs with 11 different After Effects compositions. If you don't want to look through all the data, feel free to jump right to the conclusion for our final thoughts.

CTA Image
Looking for an After Effects Workstation?

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 are the specifications of the systems we will be using for our testing:

AMD Ryzen Test Platform
CPU AMD Ryzen 9 5950X
AMD Ryzen 9 5900X
AMD Ryzen 7 5800X
CPU Cooler Noctua NH-U12S
Motherboard Gigabyte X570 AORUS ULTRA
RAM 4x DDR4-3200 16GB (64GB total)
Intel 10th Gen Test Platform
CPU Intel Core i9 10900K
Intel Core i5 10600K
CPU Cooler Noctua NH-U12S
Motherboard Gigabyte Z490 Vision D
RAM 4x DDR4-3200 16GB (64GB total)
AMD Threadripper 3rd Gen Test Platform
CPU AMD TR 3990X
AMD TR 3970X
AMD TR 3960X
CPU Cooler Noctua NH-U14S TR4-SP3
Motherboard Gigabyte TRX40 AORUS PRO WIFI
RAM 4x DDR4-3200 16GB (64GB total)
Intel X-10000 Series Test Platform
CPU Intel Core i9 10980XE
CPU Cooler Noctua NH-U12DX i4
Motherboard Gigabyte X299 Designare EX
RAM 4x DDR4-2933 16GB (64GB total)
AMD Threadripper Pro 3000 Series Test Platform
CPU AMD TR Pro 3975WX 32 Core
CPU Cooler Noctua NH-U14S TR4-SP3
Motherboard Asus Pro WS WRX80E-SAGE SE WIFI
RAM 8x DDR4-3200 16GB Reg. ECC (128GB total)
Shared PC Hardware/Software
Video Card NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 10GB
Hard Drive Samsung 970 Pro 1TB
Software Windows 10 Pro 64-bit (Ver. 2009)
After Effects 2021 (Ver. 18.1 BETA)

*All the latest drivers, OS updates, BIOS, and firmware applied as of March 10, 2021

In order to see how each of these configurations performs with the new Multi-Frame Rendering feature in After Effects, we will be using our PugetBench for After Effects V0.93 benchmark as well as the test project provided by Adobe in their Blog Post. One thing to note is that since this feature currently only supports rendering (exporting), we will not worry about presenting the RAM Preview or Tracking results.

Starting off with the good!

In most of our testing, we saw anywhere from decent to excellent performance increases with Multi-Frame Rendering. We will touch on the few times where we did not see a benefit with this feature in the next section, but first, let's take a look at these "good" test cases:

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

By far, the "AE Pulse Benchmark" test project provided by Adobe shows the most impressive gains with this new feature. This makes sense, as to why would Adobe use a project that wasn't a best-case situation as an example? We wouldn't call this project a synthetic test by any means, however, and is well within what you might see in your own workflow.

With this composition, the smallest performance gain was around 1.4x on the lower core count CPUs like the Intel Core i5 10600K 6 Core and AMD Ryzen 7 5800X 8 Core. This steadily rose to about a 2x improvement with the 10-16 core CPUs, and peaked at a 3.25x (!) increase in performance with the AMD Threadripper Pro 3975WX 32 Core. Interestingly, even though the Threadripper 3990X has double the cores of the Threadripper 3970X (64 vs 32), it was not any faster with Multi-Frame Rendering. This suggests that at a certain point, more cores won't help as the system is bottlenecked by other parts of the computer like the RAM, GPU, or I/O bandwidth.

The next best compositions for this feature were the "Expressions", "Motion Blur", and "Cloud Lightning Project" portions of our After Effects benchmark. Interestingly, the performance gain was fairly similar across all the CPUs for these tests – coming in at an average of 1.7-1.9x faster.

From there, the performance gains get less impressive with the "Phone Composite" and "Realistic Rain" projects averaging anywhere from 1.1x to 1.2x faster with Multi-Frame Rendering. This is still a nice bump in performance, but nothing like the other compositions.

Still a few rough spots to work out…

As a reminder, Multi-Frame Rendering is in BETA and very much still in development. We would frankly be astonished if we did not encounter any issues with it! Through the course of our testing, we actually didn't have any stability issues, but there were a few instances where performance was a bit worse with it enabled:

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

The first rough spot we found was with the "Glitch" composition in our PugetBench for After Effects benchmark. We did still see some decent performance gains (primarily with the Intel Core i5 10600K), but on many of the higher-end CPUs, we saw about a 10% drop in performance with Multi-Frame Rendering.

The two compositions that look at performance with the Cinema4D rendering engine are where Multi-Frame Rendering had the biggest issues. It makes sense that this would be problematic since it is not only using After Effects, but also an external rendering engine. With these two compositions, we saw on average a 15% drop in performance with Multi-Frame Rendering, with a 30% drop on the Intel Core i9 10980XE being the most severe.

Will this change what CPU is best for After Effects?

One of the biggest things we wanted to find out with this early testing was whether it is likely to change what CPUs we recommend for After Effects. In previous versions, the AMD Ryzen line was best in terms of pure performance even though they have significantly fewer cores than the AMD Threadripper and Threadripper Pro line. With improved multi-core capabilities, however, this very well may change.

After Effects 18.1 BETA CPU performance with Multi-Frame Rendering verses previews versions
Image
After Effects 18.1 BETA CPU performance with Multi-Frame Rendering verses previews versions
Open Full Resolution

To get a broad look at how performance may change once this feature hits release, we grabbed the "Render Score" from our PugetBench for After Effects benchmark runs for each CPU. We also went ahead and ran our benchmark on the 17.7 and 18.0 versions of After Effects so we could see how the relative performance changes across the three versions.

Overall, it doesn't look like the relative performance for each CPU is going to change all that much. The absolute performance is of course higher with 18.1 BETA using Multi-Frame Rendering, but it looks like the AMD Ryzen line will still be the one to use for maximum performance, while Threadripper sacrifices a bit of performance in order to dramatically increase how much RAM you can install in your system (which in many workflows is well worth the small performance hit).

This would change a bit if we included the AE Pulse Benchmark from Adobe, but even there, the AMD Threadripper CPUs only match the AMD Ryzen 5950X 16 Core. Threadripper Pro, however, does manage to take a slight lead in that test.

How well does Multi-Frame Rendering work in After Effects BETA?

Overall, we are very impressed with the upcoming Multi-Frame Rendering feature in After Effects. It is still in BETA with many features yet to come, but in our early testing, performance improvements of 1.5-2x are not uncommon, and in certain situations, we saw more than a 3x improvement in render times. There are certainly still kinks for Adobe to work out (hence why it is in beta), but as the first iteration of this feature, it is very, very good.

After Effects BETA Multi-Frame Rendering relative CPU performance
Image
After Effects BETA Multi-Frame Rendering relative CPU performance
Open Full Resolution

As you might have guessed by the number of CPUs and compositions we included for a feature that is still in beta, we are very excited about Multi-Frame Rendering. It doesn't appear that it will dramatically change what kinds of workstations we sell and recommend for After Effects, but in many ways that is a good thing. If it were to suddenly change what kinds of CPUs are best, we would be left with a huge number of users that suddenly have systems that are not optimized for After Effects. Instead, this is looking like something that will simply be a boon for everyone.

We look forward to seeing this feature developing in the coming months – especially when composition preview support is added! Keep an eye on our articles, as we will likely post follow-up articles as this feature is expanded and improved.

CTA Image
Looking for an After Effects Workstation?

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

  • NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Workstation Content Creation Review
  • Puget Mobile 16″ Laptop (2025) Product Showcase
  • Z890 vs. B860 vs. H810
  • AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT Content Creation Review
View All Related Content

Latest Content

  • Unreal Fest 2025: Highlights from Orlando
  • NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Workstation Content Creation Review
  • Puget Mobile 16″ Laptop (2025) Product Showcase
  • Why PugetBench for Premiere Pro is Dropping HEVC Encoding Tests
View All
Tags: 3970X, 3975WX, 5800X, 5900X, 5950X, After Effects, AMD Ryzen 5000 Series, AMD Threadripper 3rd Gen, i5 10600K, i9 10900K, i9 10980XE, Intel 10th Gen, Intel X-10000, Intel X-series, Threadripper 3990X

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

  • Unreal Fest 2025: Highlights from Orlando
  • NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Workstation Content Creation Review
  • Puget Mobile 16″ Laptop (2025) Product Showcase
  • Why PugetBench for Premiere Pro is Dropping HEVC Encoding Tests
  • NVIDIA Blackwell GPU GenAI Software Support
View All

Post navigation

 NVLink Performance in DaVinci Resolve 17.0Best Workstation PC for Unreal Engine (Spring 2021) 
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.