Over the past few weeks, we’ve shown you how to run some of the benchmarks we run in our laptop reviews to see how well your PC compares to others on the market. Today we look at PugetBench for After Effectscreated by the PC manufacturer Puget Systems, which will measure how well your computer can handle VFX and graphics work.

It is important to note that this benchmark is still in beta. It’s a bit more glitchy than some of the other Puget benchmarks (including the one for Photoshop, which we talked about earlier). If you’re having trouble, Puget Systems has: a long list of troubleshooting steps to attempt. It’s doubly important that you don’t use the system (not even bump the mouse) while PugetBench for After Effects is running – this could break the benchmark and force you to start over.

To run the benchmark:

• If you have Adobe Creative Cloud, sign up and go to Stock & Marketplace. Search PugetBench for After Effects and install it.
• You can also find it for free on the Adobe website† You still need to install it from the Creative Cloud desktop app; you will find instructions here†

• Open AfterEffects.
• Go to After Effects > Preferences > Scripting and Expressions and check the box next to Allow scripts to write files and access the network†
• Create a new composition and then go to Composition > Example and uncheck the box Idle cache frames† You can close the new composition once you’ve done this.
• Now you are ready to run the plugin. Go to Window > Extensions > PugetBench for After Effects† A window will appear where you can enter your license key (if you have one) and adjust any other settings you want.

Note: You must have at least 12 GB of memory available to use After Effects. If you don’t have enough, the benchmark will throw an error and tell you to allocate more.

When it’s done, the benchmark will give you a score and (unless you’ve entered a license key) upload it to the public database† Here you can see how your score compares to other machines that have run the benchmark. The results for all of Puget Systems’ benchmarks are here, so make sure After Effects is selected as you go through them.