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Participating Frequently
April 17, 2026

P: ACR 18.3 is unusable unless you disable GPU acceleration,

  • April 17, 2026
  • 10 replies
  • 63 views

I have never had an issue with ACR before.18.3 freezing saying not responding saving files took twenty minutes instead of seconds everything was super laging, when I disabled the GPU acceleration it improved I see on the other pages I am not alone I'm using the most up to date windows, Nvidia drivers ETC: I have a 7950x, 5090, 64GB and NVME drives. Please fix as soon as possible or at least give a link to the previous version which I had no issues with.

    10 replies

    Participating Frequently
    April 18, 2026

    why do they have to break something whenever there is an update?????. 

    rickburress
    Inspiring
    April 18, 2026

    I am also experiencing this issue with GPU on. Weoking on a Mac M3 Max with 128 GB of RAM, 

      Chipset Model: Apple M3 Max

      Type: GPU

      Bus: Built-In

      Total Number of Cores: 40

      Vendor: Apple (0x106b)

      Metal Support: Metal 4

      Displays:

    Color LCD:

      Display Type: Built-in Liquid Retina XDR Display

      Resolution: 3456 x 2234 Retina

      Main Display: Yes

      Mirror: Off

      Online: Yes

      Automatically Adjust Brightness: No

      Connection Type: Internal

    tptobias
    Participant
    April 17, 2026

    First of all camera RAW 18.3 is significantly slower, can't really use it anymore.

    Second it totally freezes if you first change ratio/crop photo and after that want to apply a preset.

    Is there a way i can downgrade back to the previous version?

    Oh and this webpage to a form for bug reports is uselss! Because there isnt a form to fill in. (https://www.adobe.com/nl/products/wishform.html#sa_src=web-messaging)

     

    peterb86513089
    Inspiring
    April 18, 2026

    I too had problems with ACR 18.3 and could not use it for my work. Unfortunately it is not possible to use the Creative Cloud application to install an older version of ACR. I contacted Adobe support (via the chat with an agent) and after a brief discussion they provide me a link to the ACR 18.0.0 installer. You should contact Adobe support if you need to install a prior version of ACR.

    Peter

    Rikk Flohr_Photography
    Community Manager
    April 17, 2026

    I’ve consolidated the posts from the Announcement thread to this bug report and logged a ticket for the Camera Raw team to investigate. 

    Thanks for making a separate report. 

    It is definitely not the best to report suspected bugs on a product announcement and this is the better way to go. 

     

    Rikk Flohr: Adobe Photography Org
    Participating Frequently
    April 17, 2026

    Thanks 

    Participating Frequently
    April 17, 2026

    I'm having the same issue as a lot of people here the previous version of ACR I had no Issues 18.3 is barely useable unless I turn off GPU Acceleration, I'm using a 7950X, 5090, 64GB memory and NVME drives.

    peterb86513089
    Inspiring
    April 17, 2026

    Yes, I gave up. Unfortunately I could not find other versions of ACR from the Creative Cloud application. And the link I had saved for ACR plug-installer pointed to version 14, which seemed to me to be very old. So I contacted Adobe support (from within the Creative Cloud application) and chatted, first with a bot and then with an agent, who was able to provide me a link to ACR 18.0. I have now reverted to 18.0 and that has resolved my issues.

    Peter

    peterb86513089
    Inspiring
    April 17, 2026

    I should add that I did not notice whether turning off the GPU accelerator made any difference. So for my case the overall thread title may not reflect my problem.

    peterb86513089
    Inspiring
    April 17, 2026

    For what it is worth…

     

    peterb86513089
    Inspiring
    April 17, 2026

    Oh, meant to ask - how can I vert to version 18.2? I can’t use this 18.3 and I need to get stuff done today.

    I have this link to the ACR Plug-in Installer but it points to 18.3 or 14.5. I need to get to 18.2.

    https://helpx.adobe.com/camera-raw/kb/camera-raw-plug-in-installer.html

    Thanks, any help would be appreciated,

    Peter

     

    peterb86513089
    Inspiring
    April 17, 2026

    Hi. I just upgrade to version 18.3.0.2528 yesterday, and I immediately notice problems (prior version was 18.2.2.2512). I launch ACR from Bridge. When I fist launched 18.3 I noticed the fans in my PC and GPU kicked up and when I zoomed an image to 100% it was blurry. The same image viewed at 100% in Bridge is crisp sharp. And there is a little spinning circle in the lower right corner which I think means that ACR is busy. GPU and CPU activity is high. At one point ACR and Bridge were unresponsive and after 10minutes I had to kill the Br process.

    second image is viewed in Bridge

    Peter

    Participating Frequently
    April 16, 2026

    Huge performance hit from the latest update. I’m barely able to work on my images as it keeps freezing all the time. I’ll need to find a way to downgrade because that’s frankly unusable right now.

    Also not a fan of where the new Projection transformation is placed right now. That and the new Anamorphic setting pushed every other Geometry settings down. Now I need to relearn mouse placement as I mostly use Vertical, Horizontal and Rotate when working on photos. I need to work fast and I don’t want to keeps my eyes off the image when adjusting settings. But that’s mostly preference anyway

    Participating Frequently
    April 16, 2026

    Is there really no official way to go back to previous version of ACR? 

    David Franzen at Work
    Adobe Employee
    Adobe Employee
    April 16, 2026

    Can you tell me what kind of computer you are using? OS, OS version, CPU, GPU.

    Thank you.

    pascalm3859019
    Known Participant
    April 16, 2026

    After the update ACR has a massive memory leak on the graphics card. When working on a picture in ACR the app gets slower after a few minutes and if you open the Windows Task Manager the memory on the graphics card (24Gb RTX 4090) is completely filled up and also some shared memory is used.

    Please fix this as soon as possible!

    Thank you.