Photoshop 40% GPU usage when doing nothing

Hey everyone,

I've been trying to figure out what's wrong with Illustrator and Photoshop for the past months. But the situation is getting unbearable.

I have a MacBook Pro M1 Max and a MacBook Air M4. Both with the same macOS Tahoe version, and the latest Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator versions.

When both are sitting completely idle with nothing open, they're at 0% CPU and 0% GPU load.
Then I open Illustrator. No document. I don't touch anything. Just the app sitting there. I check Activity Monitor and the WindowServer process shows:

• on the M1 Max, 0% GPU
• on the M4 Air, 20% GPU

The situation gets worse when I open Photoshop at the same time, where
the GPU goes to 50% load for the M4 Air just by doing nothing.
The M1 Max stays at 0%.

Of course when you do actual work in the programs, the GPU load gets even higher, to a point where they get laggy and unbearable to work with. The M1 Max shows no such problem.

I tried the following and nothing worked:

• Turning off Animated Zoom
• Turning off Real-Time Drawing and Editing
• Closing the Libraries panel and the Discover panel
• Resetting prefs with Cmd+Option+Shift on launch
• A full reinstall of Illustrator and Photoshop
• A clean macOS install on the M4 (yes, really)

The only thing that works and brings the GPU back to 0% is putting Illustrator and Photoshop into full screen (by pressing F).

My guess is that Tahoe and Adobe aren't optimized yet for the M4 🤷‍♂️.

Please fix it Adobe.