Render with OpenGL

OpenGL is a set of standards for high-performance processing of 2D and 3D graphics on the graphics processing unit (GPU) for a wide variety of applications. For After Effects users, OpenGL provides fast rendering for previews and final output by moving rendering from the CPU to the GPU on the display card. Sometimes, performance improvements due to processing on the GPU are referred to as hardware acceleration.

To use OpenGL in After Effects, you’ll need a display card that supports OpenGL 2.0 and has Shader support and support for NPOT (Non Power of Two) textures.

Feature support in After Effects is dependent on the OpenGL hardware; contact the hardware manufacturer for details. When you first start After Effects, it attempts to determine if your display card meets the OpenGL requirements, and then enables or disables OpenGL as appropriate.

For information regarding specific OpenGL hardware, go to the After Effects section of the Adobe website.

Important: Because not all features of a composition can be rendered with OpenGL—and because some features that can be rendered with OpenGL are rendered with different results—you may only want to use OpenGL rendering to accelerate previews and to provide faster rendering for non-final results.

For information about rendering for previews with OpenGL, see Preview modes.

Note: You cannot use the Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously multiprocessing feature while also using OpenGL to render RAM previews or render for final output. The Render Multiple Frames Simultaneously feature works by using background processes on multiple CPU processor cores to render frames. (See Memory & Multiprocessing preferences.)

OpenGL in After Effects can render the following features:

  • Shadows, except point light shadows (Colored shadows appear gray.)

  • Lights (eight maximum)

  • Masks

  • Alpha channels

  • Track mattes

  • Intersecting layers

  • Transformations for 2D and 3D layers

  • GPU-accelerated effects, including Alpha Levels, Bevel Alpha, Bilateral Blur, Box Blur, Brightness & Contrast, Channel Blur, Color Balance, Color Balance (HLS), Curves, Directional Blur, Drop Shadow, Fast Blur, Find Edges, Fractal Noise, Gaussian Blur, Hue/Saturation, Invert, Noise, Radial Blur, Ramp, Sharpen, Tint, and Turbulent Noise

  • All blending modes except Dissolve and Dancing Dissolve

  • Metal property settings for 3D layers

  • Cone feather settings for light layers

  • 2D motion blur

  • Adjustment layers

  • Anti-aliasing

  • Depth-of-field blur

  • Nested compositions

    Note: OpenGL is not used to render a nested composition if the precomposition layer has a mask or a non-GPU-accelerated effect applied to it.
Important: Use caution when enabling the OpenGL renderer in a network rendering environment. Inconsistencies may arise if differences exist in the sets of features that the OpenGL cards in the network support.

When OpenGL does not support a feature, it simply renders without using that feature. For example, if your layers contain shadows and your OpenGL hardware does not support shadows, the output will not contain shadows.

  • To enable OpenGL for rendering final output, click the underlined text next to Render Settings in the Render Queue panel, and select Use OpenGL Renderer.
  • To enable OpenGL for rendering previews, choose Edit > Preferences > Previews (Windows) or After Effects > Preferences > Previews (Mac OS), and select Enable OpenGL. To also allow OpenGL to render at a lower resolution to maintain rendering speed while rendering complex compositions for previews, select Enable Adaptive Resolution With OpenGL.
  • To see what features your OpenGL card supports, choose Edit > Preferences > Previews (Windows) or After Effects > Preferences > Previews (Mac OS), and click OpenGL Info.
  • To modify the amount of texture memory, choose Edit > Preferences > Previews (Windows) or After Effects > Preferences > Previews (Mac OS), click OpenGL Info, and enter a value for Texture Memory of no more than 80% of the installed video RAM (VRAM) on your video card.
    Note: Mac OS provides the total amount of Texture Memory available on the display card in the OpenGL Information dialog box; Windows does not.