Hi penserv, Sorry about the experience your facing with Edge Animate. I'm assuming that you areon Windows since you mentioned Task Manager. We have a known performance issue in Edge Animate and I would like to suggest the below workaround for this.
Workaround:
a) Go to Control panel/Color management/
b) Click Advanced tab and check if the Device profile is anything other than System default.
c) If it is set to anything other than system default we have found the performance of Animate to be poor.
d) Reset it to system default unless there is a specific reason you need a different color profile. This will fix the known performance issue with Animate.
Note: We are investigating this and planning on a fix in an upcoming release, so that you need not change to default color profile.
Let me know if this helped.
-Sujai