After Effects CS6 takes advantage of all the CPU power

After Effects CS6 takes advantage of all the CPU power available to it. Many After Effects features
are accelerated on a multiprocessor system through the use of multithreading, where it employs
all of the cores—both real and virtual—available to it in order to process imagery.

In addition, After Effects may also be set in Preferences > Memory & Multiprocessing to Render
Multiple Frames Simultaneously. When this multiprocessing option is enabled, After Effects will
launch additional copies of itself in the background, each processing individual frames for RAM
Previews and final renders. Note that multiprocessing can only use physical processor cores, not
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virtual cores created by hyperthreading; you should also reserve at least two physical cores for
the operating system and other software running at the same time. To translate this theory to a
typical application, a computer with 12 physical cores may appear to the operating system as
having 24 cores, but in reality you can safely assign a maximum of 10 CPUs (processor cores).
Certain functions in After Effects CS6 are accelerated by the GPU in your computer, including the
Cartoon effect, some Fast Previews settings for 3D compositions, and the drawing of images to the
Composition, Footage, and Layer panels. Additionally, the new Ray-traced 3D rendering engine
introduced in CS6 is massively accelerated by the presence of a compatible CUDA-enabled NVIDIA
graphics card or chip set.