The finite element method (FEM), with consistent meshing and fixed time step, is commonly used to analyze the dynamic response of the top tensioned riser (TTR). The meshing and time step sizes in the dynamic response are often determined with empirical summary, which results in a loss of the riser element accuracy and analysis efficiency. A high-performance space-time adaptive (FEM) of the TTR is proposed to gain satisfactory meshing and time step. The dynamic analysis is divided with the adaptive method into space mesh adaptive and time step adaptive stage. The space mesh adaptive scheme is established considering riser dynamic characteristics to calculate the space discretization error and obtain a new meshing distribution in the space mesh adaptive stage. The time step adaptive scheme is established to evaluate the time discretization error at each time step with time error estimator and acquire the modified time step in the time step adaptive stage. Several cases are given verify the efficiency and accuracy of the proposed method. The proposed method can appropriately resolve the conflict between calculation accuracy and cost, and efficiently improve the dynamic analysis performance of the TTR.