Adobe After Effects – NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Performance

Introduction

On September 1st, NVIDIA launched the new GeForce RTX 30 Series, touting major advancements in performance and efficiency. And while gaming is almost always a major focus during these launches, professional applications like After Effects should see some improvements as well. Ever since version 2015.3, Adobe has been steadily adding support for GPU acceleration in After Effects 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, so will these new cards have anything to offer for After Effects users?

If you want to see the full specs for the new GeForce RTX 3070, 3080, and 3090 cards, we recommend checking out NVIDIAs page for the new 30 series cards. But at a glance, here are what we consider to be the most important specs:

While specs rarely line up with real-world performance, it is a great sign that NVIDIA has doubled the number of CUDA cores compared to the comparable RTX 20 series cards with only a small drop in the boost clock. At the same time, the RTX 3080 and 3090 are also $500-1000 less expensive than the previous generation depending on which models you are comparing them to.

Since only the RTX 3080 is fully launched at this point (the 3090 is set to launch on Sept 24th, and the 3070 sometime in October), we, unfortunately, will only be able to examine the 3080 at this time. However, we are very interested in how the RTX 3070 and 3090 will perform, and when we are able to test those cards, we will post follow-up articles with the results.

Test Setup

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

*All the latest drivers, OS updates, BIOS, and firmware applied as of September 7th, 2020

To test each GPU, we will be using the fastest platform currently available for After Effects – most notably the AMD Threadripper 3960X. Since After Effects utilizes the CPU so heavily, this should minimize the impact of the processor and allow each GPU to perform at their fullest potential.

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 primarily care about, examining the raw results for that task is going to be much more applicable than our more general analysis.

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.

Looking at the overall performance, the new GeForce RTX 3080 does technically top our charts, but the difference between it and the other NVIDIA cards is so slight that it won't be noticeable in most situations. In fact, the difference between the RTX 3080 and the modest RTX 2060 SUPER is only 3%, which is within the margin of error for this type of real-world testing.

Even if we dive into the RAM Preview and Rendering results (ignoring Tracking as that purely uses the CPU), there isn't much of a difference between each NVIDIA GPU. There is definitely an advantage to using NVIDIA over AMD, but beyond that, there doesn't appear to be a significant benefit to using a higher-end GPU.

However, if we examine our "GPU Stress" project by itself (which pushes the GPU as much as is realistic in After Effects), we can get a look at the maximum possible performance gain you may encounter with the RTX 3080.

GPU Score Analysis

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 composition, we actually see a pretty good bump in performance with the new GeForce RTX 3080. An 11% increase in performance over the RTX 2080 Ti may not seem like all that much compared to the performance gains we saw in some of our other articles, but for After Effects that is pretty good. It is on par with the performance gain when going from a GTX 1080 Ti to an RTX 2080 Ti, except that the RTX 3080 is $500 less expensive than the RTX 2080 Ti.

How well does the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 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 in certain situations, the new GeForce RTX 3080 can be around 11% faster than the previous generation RTX 2080 Ti or 16% faster than the RTX 2080 SUPER. And for those that are a few generations behind, the RTX 3080 can be more than 20% faster than the GTX 1080 Ti.

If you already have an RTX video card, the RTX 3080 may not be worth a straight upgrade given how CPU bound After Effects is. But for a new workstation (or those that are still using an NVIDIA GTX 10 series or older GPU), it's very reasonable MSRP of $699 makes it an attractive option.

However, another factor you may want to keep in mind is how the RTX 3080 performs in rendering engines (we currently have articles up for OctaneRender, V-Ray, and RedShift). Even if you do not use these rendering engines today, After Effects has been indicating a trend towards using them more heavily in the future (especially since RedShift was acquired by Maxon), so it is likely that you will be using one of them in the near future if you do any 3D work. You may not get excited about the performance gains we saw in After Effects, but the performance of the new RTX 30 series cards in these rendering engines is absolutely fantastic.

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 new RTX 3080 GPU, as well as with different CPUs and other hardware.