After Effects Minimum Requirements | PROVEN • 2025 |

Laptop CPUs "throttle" (slow down) when they get hot. After Effects makes them hot in about 90 seconds. A laptop with "i9" specs will perform worse than a desktop with "i5" specs after 10 minutes of rendering because the laptop runs out of thermal headroom.

More RAM. If you can only buy one thing, buy RAM. Then set your disk cache to a fast SSD.

After Effects loads every single frame of your composition into your RAM before it plays back. 8GB is eaten up by your operating system, Spotify, and Chrome. By the time you open AE, you have roughly 2GB left for a 4K comp. after effects minimum requirements

You open Adobe After Effects. You drag in a clip. You add one effect. The fan on your laptop roars to life like a jet engine. The playback stutters. A beach ball of death appears. Then, the crash.

You’ve just had a brilliant idea for a video. It involves a 3D spinning logo, some kinetic typography that punches the screen, and a particle effect that rains glitter on a dystopian cityscape. Laptop CPUs "throttle" (slow down) when they get hot

16GB. The Sweet Spot: 32GB. The "Time is Money" Pro: 64GB+. The Processor Paradox (Single Core vs. The World) Most software loves many cores. Premiere Pro will happily use 16 cores to export video. After Effects? It’s a diva.

We’ve all been there.

Pro tip: NVIDIA is historically more stable with AE than AMD due to CUDA support. Most people buy a fast CPU and forget the hard drive. Big mistake. After Effects creates thousands of temporary cache files. If you are writing those to a slow mechanical hard drive (HDD), your computer will stutter even if you have a supercomputer for a CPU.