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.
4GB VRAM (NVIDIA RTX 3050 / AMD Radeon 6600) The Pro: 8GB+ VRAM (NVIDIA RTX 4070+) after effects minimum requirements
We’ve all been there.
You will not get real-time playback. You will get a slideshow. You open Adobe After Effects
Here is the real-world guide to what you actually need, from Starter to Superhero . Adobe officially says 8GB of RAM is the minimum. That is technically true—in the same way that a spoon is technically a shovel. The fan on your laptop roars to life like a jet engine
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.
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.