After Effects CS5.5 - Poor performance

Question

The tech info:
After Effects 5.5 Version 10.5.1.2
Windows 7 x64 SP1
The problem persists when no video is present
No error messages are being shown
Atempting to "Play" in preview or attempting to "Ram Preview" will show the larges problems, seeking in the timeline causes the entire program to hang as well
Not on this computer (My computer specs below)
Chrome, Skype, Steam, Taskmanager (closing all of these does not change the problem)
No thrid party codecs are installed
My computer is as follows:
Core i7 920 (Bloomfiled) OC 3.2ghz (4 cores, 8 logical threads)
XFX 7970 3GB
15GB DDR3 1333mhz (OC 1666)
120gb SSD (280mB/ps read | 240mB/ps writes @ 4k) 25Gb is free
Zero external drives are conected
I am using no 3rd party IO hardware of any kind
The problem persists when OpenGL is on or off
The problem persisits when I am using "Render Multiple frames" and when it is not enabled
My problem is that when I set up a project at 1920x1080 and just ask it to play a black screen I get ~12fps Not Realtime if I set the "preview quality" down to 1/2 I get ~10fps if I set the preview quality down to 1.5% I get ~8fps. While this is occuring my CPU usage is hard at 12% (one logical CPU pegged). When seeking the entire program will hang for 2 to 3 seconds while it grabs and "renders" the next empty frame, adding effects and clips does not change this performance in any way, I can have several clips placed in the timeline and performance persists at its constant 12fps regardless.
If anyone has any ideas Im open, Id love to get after effects working but in this state I spend 75% of my time waiting for the program to "start responding" after asking it to seek.

Answer 1

There is almost no overhead in "rotating" the monitors, thats all native to the GPU. There is no performance difference between 5760x1080 and 3240x1920. If there is any overhead its going to be in the de-stiching of the backbuffers. But this problem persisits even when I am not in an eyefinity display group. Double checked by rotating out of portrait mode as well same performance issue. Figured this was stupid and disabled my other 2 monitors and checked just by using one, same problem no framerate change whatsoever. Thought it my be because of HDMI, nope same thing on DVI.
I dont know what kind of computer still has issues with simple translations of pixels, if this were the early two thousands I could understand where your coming from but its not so I am confused.
Also if it were having trouble with "translating" the pixels 2 things would have happened and below is why I believe that is not possible.
1. Because after effects is running on a different process the "overhead" that you speak of would be handled by the other 7 logical threads or the 88% of the processor that is sitting free.
2. If the "translation" was not handled by the CPU and was GPU bound, that means the bottleneck would have to occur within the GPUs pixelshader array or vertex processor, both of witch are sitting clocked down and not under load. When openGL / DirextX / OpenCL is used the GPU will clock up and become under load, at that point the bottleneck could occur. But this is not the case.
3. After effects has no knowelege of a "rotated" or "eyefinity" display, in windows, the backbuffer is handled the same as any other rotation of the monitor as a simple 2D array of pixels.
I only wish it were so simple as using just 1 monitor.
Any other ideas?