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Federica Selvaggini
Participant
August 12, 2026

Substance Painter extremely slow / freezing on startup and during use after latest update (RTX 3070, Win, 16GB RAM)

  • August 12, 2026
  • 3 replies
  • 76 views

Hi everyone,
For the past few weeks I've been having serious performance issues with Substance Painter, starting right after the latest updates.

  • The app takes a very long time to open, and often gets stuck on the splash screen
  • Once it does open, it's extremely slow and freezes, even with very light projects, not just heavy files
  • Running the app as Administrator improves things slightly, but it's still noticeably slow overall

System specs:

  • OS: Windows
  • GPU: RTX 3070 TI (drivers updated at the latest version)
  • RAM: 32GB
  • Substance Painter: latest version

What I've already tried:

  • Full uninstall and clean reinstall of Substance Painter
  • Full uninstall and clean reinstall of Creative Cloud
  • Clearing the cache
  • Checking for GPU/overlay conflicts (Nvidia overlay, mouse software overlay) no change
  • Running as Administrator (minor improvement, but issue persists)

Nothing has fully resolved it so far. Has anyone else run into this after the recent updates? Any suggestions on logs I should check, permissions to look at, or settings I should try would be really appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

    3 replies

    Cyril Dellenbach
    Community Manager
    Cyril DellenbachCommunity Manager
    Community Manager
    August 18, 2026

    Hello Federica,

     

    Could you tell me which version exactly you’re using? With 12.1.2, we have some known issues with performances and VRAM, but it’s not all cases. Is it running better if your rollback to a previous version?

     

    Keep me posted.

    Cyril Dellenbach (Micro) | Product Manager | Substance Painter
    Federica SelvagginiAuthor
    Participant
    August 23, 2026

    Hi Cyril, I have a subscription so is the 12.1.2 build 5641.
    It seems to work better now thet I’ve disabled creative cloud at startup of my workstation. I don’t know if is a coincidence, but now if I start painter as administrator and without creative cloud running in background it opens faster. I checked and I’m still logged in in painter without CC running in the background

      Cyril Dellenbach
      Community Manager
      Cyril DellenbachCommunity Manager
      Community Manager
      August 24, 2026

      I’m not sure it’s related, but it’s good to know! I’ll let our QA know about your issue, so they will be able to make sure there’s no conflict with CCD.

      Cyril Dellenbach (Micro) | Product Manager | Substance Painter
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