Photoshop 2026 — Brush painting capped at ~30 FPS on high-refresh-rate monitor, regardless of hardware load

Summary:
When painting with the Brush tool, Photoshop's canvas redraw appears hard-capped at approximately 31–32 FPS, even on a 144Hz monitor with a high-end GPU that is barely utilized during the stroke. This does not happen in other applications (e.g., MS Paint) on the same machine, which render smoothly up to the monitor's full refresh rate.

System specs:

• GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 (8GB VRAM)
• CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 5600 (6 Cores, 3,5 GHz)
• Driver version: 591.86, CUDA 13.1
• Monitor: 144Hz (confirmed set correctly in Windows Display settings)
• OS: Windows 11
• Photoshop version: Adobe Photoshop 2026

Steps to reproduce:

1. Open any document (tested on both small ~1000x1000px and larger 2560x1440px canvases — file size does not affect the issue)
2. Select the Brush tool (tested with standard round brushes, Smoothing set to 0%)
3. Paint continuously on the canvas while monitoring FPS via MSI Afterburner / RivaTuner Statistics Server overlay
4. Observed FPS stays around 31–32 FPS during active brush strokes

What I've already tried (none resolved the issue):

• Disabled V-Sync in NVIDIA Control Panel
• Disabled G-Sync both globally and specifically for the Photoshop.exe application profile (via NVIDIA Profile Inspector, using "Force Off" on both GSYNC - Application State and GSYNC - Application Requested State)
• Disabled OpenCL in Photoshop's Advanced Graphics Processor Settings
• Toggled "Enable Modern User Interface" off/on under Technology Previews
• Tested on a brand new, empty document with no layers, masks, or Lock Transparent Pixels enabled
• Confirmed GPU usage stays under 10% and CPU under 20% during the lag (via Task Manager), ruling out a hardware bottleneck
• Confirmed the issue is not present in MS Paint on the same hardware, which renders at full monitor refresh rate

Expected behavior:
Brush stroke rendering should scale with available hardware and refresh rate, similar to how it behaves in other raster applications, rather than being capped at ~30 FPS.

Additional notes:
I found a similar report on the Adobe Community forums (thread: "Cursor stuttering & screen flickering in Photoshop on high refresh rate G-sync monitors") where multiple users report similar symptoms specific to Adobe applications, not reproducible in other DCC tools (Blender, Clip Studio Paint). An Adobe employee (howardpinsky) acknowledged the report and said they would escalate it to the team for investigation.