To Adjust Hardware Settings For Opengl Previews - Adobe AFTER EFFECTS 7.0 Manual

When OpenGL does not support a feature, it simply creates a preview without using that feature. For example, if your
layers contain shadows and your OpenGL hardware does not support shadows, the preview will not contain
shadows.
To get the full benefit of OpenGL in After Effects, you'll need an OpenGL card that supports OpenGL 2.0 and has
Shader support and support for NPOT (Non Power of Two) textures. The minimum requirement for using OpenGL
with After Effects is a card that supports OpenGL 1.5. When you first start After Effects, it will attempt to determine
if your OpenGL card meets the requirements, and enables or disables OpenGL as appropriate.
You can view information about your OpenGL card, as well as enable or disable OpenGL, by choosing Edit >
Preferences > Previews (Windows) or After Effects > Preferences > Previews (Mac OS). Click the OpenGL Info
button to learn more about your card.
Note: When you choose Edit > Preferences > Memory & Cache, you'll see a checkbox labeled Prevent DLL Address Space
Fragmentation, which is toggled on by default. This is to give After Effects access to more contiguous memory on systems
with large amounts of RAM; however, it may be incompatible with some OpenGL drivers, which cancause it to crash on
launch. Should this occur, this option will become unchecked automatically to prevent further crashes when you launch
After Effects.
OpenGL hardware supports layers up to 2048 x 2048 pixels. After Effects downsamples larger layers during OpenGL
preview. Complex effects can slow down OpenGL preview. If the preview is too slow, turn off OpenGL and use
another preview method.
Note: OpenGL works with 8 and 16 bpc projects only.
Choose Edit > Preferences > Previews (Windows) or After Effects > Preferences > Previews (Mac OS).
1
2 Select Enable OpenGL, and click OK.
Click the Fast Previews button
3
Do one of the following:
4
•
Select OpenGL—Interactive from the menu to use OpenGL only for interactions, such as manual previewing
(scrubbing) in the Timeline panel or dragging a layer in the Composition panel. You can tell that OpenGL is
engaging by looking at the Fast Previews icon, which will light up.
•
Select OpenGL—Always On to use OpenGL for all previews. In this mode, "OpenGL" will appear in the upper left
corner of the Composition panel.

To adjust hardware settings for OpenGL previews

Choose Edit > Preferences > Previews (Windows) or After Effects > Preferences > Previews (Mac OS).
1
Click OpenGL Info.
2
3 Enter a value for Texture Memory of no more than 80% of the installed video RAM (VRAM) on your video card.
Choose one of the following items from the Quality menu:
4
Reduces the quality of OpenGL previews to increase performance.
Faster
Includes blending modes in the preview and improves the quality of lighting, shading, and blending.
More Accurate
In some cases—depending on your card and composition complexity—this mode can be faster than Faster mode.
Note: Mac OS provides the total amount of Texture Memory available on the display card in the OpenGL Info panel;
Windows does not.
in the Composition panel.
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