After Effects is a very well-known program for video post-production, to add animations and visual effects in videos. To evaluate the performance of each CPU running this program, we ran a workload consisting of 25 compositions that applied several filters and effects to a variety of input file types such as PSD (Photoshop), AI (Illustrator), EPS, and TIF. After each filter was applied, the composition was rendered to an uncompressed AVI file of the same resolution as the input files. The results below are the time each CPU took to finish the whole batch, given in seconds, so the lower the number the better.

On After Effects CS4 Core i7-980X was the fastest CPU and here we can clearly see the difference in performance the extra cores can bring on an application that can take advantage of them: the reviewed CPU was 28% faster than Core i7-965, 30% faster than Core i7-870, 47% faster than Core i5-750 and 59% faster than Phenom II X4 965.