After Effects Minimum Requirements May 2026

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.

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. after effects minimum requirements

Now go make that glitter dystopia without the crash. After Effects loads every single frame of your