The speed and responsiveness you’ll experience with Global Performance Cache is due to a group of technologies: a global RAM cache, a persistent disk cache, and a new graphics pipeline. They all work together to make the best use of the RAM, disk space, 64-bit CPU cores, and video card on your computer.

Reuse elements or play “what if” with various ideas without waiting for a previously created frame to rerender thanks to a vastly improved frame caching system called global RAM cache, a key technology in Global Performance Cache. For example, you can try a new idea and then undo it without any penalty in productivity. After Effects can also calculate a composition’s work area in the background while you continue working.

Without global RAM cache, an edit to any layer requires rerendering frames before you can preview the composition. With the global RAM cache, After Effects keeps track of changes and rendered preview frames at the layer level. As you continue to edit and preview the composition, After Effects rerenders only the layers that contain changed frames, while unchanged layers are simply played back from fast RAM. With global RAM cache, you’ll find that real-time previews start playing back immediately. The timeline visually indicates which layers and frames are cached so you get a sense of how quickly to expect previews to appear.

Preview frames are reused as efficiently and intelligently as possible. After Effects doesn’t need to rerender any frame of a composition or layer that matches a previously rendered and cached frame. Reusable frames are recognized anywhere on the timeline, including when using loop expressions, time remapping, and copying then pasting keyframes — not just on adjacent frames. Reusable frames are also recognized on duplicate layers and duplicate compositions. Cached frames are preserved so they can be restored immediately after an undo/redo and when a composition or layer is returned to a previous state, such as turning a layer’s visibility off and then back on.

When you open a project you were working on earlier, you can get right to work and play back your edits more quickly. Thanks to a Global Performance Cache technology called persistent disk cache, the entire cache  rendered in the previous session remains intact for your next session, ready for you to immediately preview or render a composition.

Under the hood, After Effects decides if a frame cached to RAM would take less time to retrieve from disk than to render again, and if so, that frame is copied to a disk cache. When you open a project, After Effects scans the disk cache, looking for frames matching those in the project, and makes them available again for immediate use since they don’t need to be rerendered. This is particularly a boon when you need to work on multiple projects during the course of the day or week, and also saves precious time when recovering from power outages, system crashes, and other issues that inevitably occur on deadline. Additionally, this cache contains frames from all of the projects you’ve opened in the same or earlier sessions, so disk-cached frames from one project will be retrieved for reuse in other projects that need those same frames.

After Effects CS6 does a better job of harnessing OpenGL and the video card in your computer when drawing images to the screen. This results in faster interactivity, a more highly responsive work environment, and a smoother user experience.

You get improved playback of memory-cached frames as well as improved performance while working in larger Composition, Layer, and Footage viewer sizes (particularly useful for working with larger image formats and on larger displays). Specific benefits include faster manipulation of layers with graphical overlays such as bounding box handles, masks, motion tracker points, and motion paths, as well as working more efficiently with viewers that contain overlays such as guides and grids, custom user interfaces for effects, and interactions like brush size adjustments.

Based on early tests of After Effects CS6 performed by NVIDIA, depending on hardware configuration, many of these functions have been accelerated by a factor of 1.5 to 2.5 — with some (such as grids, guides, and rulers) as much as 16 times faster than before.

Learn how to optimize After Effects for high performance. View the in-depth video ›