Rebuild AE from the ground up so everything runs on the GPU
Last night I had to wait 5 hours to render out a 7min sequence on a 6core i7 with 2 x nVidia1070. GPU usage never went above 4% for GPU 0 and 0% for GPU 1. CPU thread 2 never went above 35% whilst all other threads stayed around 10%. Network usage never went above 350Mbps on a 10GBe connection. Every year users request that AE uses more system resources yet it still never seems to happen. By your own words AE is the industry standard for motion GRAPHICS yet it hardly utilises the GRAPHICS processing unit at all. Every single little thing at AE does should be on the GPU It is slowly getting left behind in terms off speed and performance. When I render with AE I want both my GPUs to be maxing out, not sat there idling with nothing to do.

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Kevin Monahan commented
Hey Chris, what kind of footage? What gen is your i7? What happens if you place your footage on internal high speed storage and cache files on a separate internal high speed drive (keeping the network connection out of the chain)?
CPU, RAM, and hard drive speed for cache and media are the crucial things to max out, not the GPU, as AE was not originally designed to harness that power. GPU accelerated effects are supported, however, if you don't add them, you won't see much interaction from the GPU.
In the future, I'm sure you'll see more performance enhancements for AE. Sorry for the frustration, but good that you put down this request.