Substance painter performance degrades after a few minutes from opening.

** POSSIBLE FIX ** 4070 super / 32 GB RAM / Ryzen 7800X3D 
Most likely cause: RAM LEAK 
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Hey everyone!
I actually posted on this thread a year ago under a different account. Back then, the issue seemed to resolve it itself.... until recently 😞

If any of you are like me, you often just put your system to sleep rather than initiating a full shutdown. Well - if you have a lot of low-level drivers... (Nvidia Overlay, Asus ArmoryCrate, Motherboard utilities, Lighting / Fan Controllers etc..) These apps are often very unoptimized, and in many cases they don't interact with each other very well.

If these apps are causing memory leaks, and you don't fully shut down your system after each use - this memory will accumulate over time into your NonPaged pool, and create tons of hidden ram allocation. Painter is SUPER heavy on RAM, so this would explain why we don't really experience these slow-downs as much in other creative apps. 

To verify that you are leaking RAM: 

1.   Close all apps and programs
2.  Open your task manager or resource manager.
3.  Now take a look at your allocation. 

Mine was at 86% while idle !?!

But the processes that were displayed were not nearly adding up to my full 32 GB of installed memory. I could only account for a few GB based on what I was seeing in task manager - so where is this coming from? 

The Nonpaged Pool / Page Table - you can't see this allocation in task manager, and the only way to reset these is through a reboot. This is only a temp fix however, as you have apps that are leaking RAM, and it will build right back up and eat all your memory. 

You can see in this screengrab from "RamMap" that these values were at 8GB / 3GB 
A healthy size for these is  150 mb / 300 mb - this completely explains my Substance Painter issues 

So how can you fix this on your own rig? 
(Steps 1 - 3 are just to pin-point the specific drivers. Skip to step 4 if you're okay with guessing and uninstalling/rebooting) 

1. Download RAMMap + PoolMon 
      RamMap: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/rammap
      PoolMon: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/devtest/poolmon
    
2. Run these tools as Admin to diagnose 
        RamMap:  You will want to look at the circled values in my screengrab above to confirm you are leaking RAM
               (this step is kinda optional if you know you are leaking RAM.)

        PoolMon:  This is where you will actually locate the leaky drivers.  PoolMon is a bit weird to use:
              P =  Sort by Pool Type
              B =  Sort by Bytes
              A =  Sort by allocation 
   
3.  In PoolMon, after you sort by size, look at the Tag names on the left side. 

You can do a quick internet search to figure out what apps these drivers are asociated with - or an easier solution is to use ChatGPT as a companion and it will help you figure this out. 

4.  After you've figured out which drivers/Apps are causing your RAM leak - Uninstall them and Reboot your machine.
Let it set for about 30 seconds before turning back on. 

5. Let your PC Idle for about 30 mins to 1 hour - keep task manager open, as well as RamMap if you installed it. Keep an eye on the memory allocation as well as your Nonpaged Pool, and make sure your values stay at a healthy range. You're looking for about 20 - 25% allocation. 

6. Go nuts in Substance Painter! You SHOULD be free of performance issues now as long as your system is up to spec. I really hope this helps anyone who may be experiencing issues working in Painter as I have been. 

Cheers! 

Any update on this? i'm helpless, Thinking about ,moving to Mari.

I have this problem too. Using an RTX 3080 , i9 CPU - My Substance is the Steam edition and pretty much performs as described below. A sample project onlu needs to be open for a couple of minutes before slowdown. 3D viewport becomes unworkable. 
I'd be very interested in a solution to this, my PC can handle a great many things in 3D, VR games, Blender Renders, Unity, Unreal Engine. The only app that seems to degrade over short time is Substance Painter. 

Hello I have exact same problem. I tried reinstalling drivers and other solutions I found online also I tried solutions from this topic but nothing helps, sometimes after driver ceal reinstal + SP reinstall it helps for like one sesion then it jitters again ;c

To add to my tests, I have tried downgrading drivers to previous versions, uninstalling and reinstalling to another drive and messing with some windows properties, still at a loss with no improvements. 

Hello once again, unfortunately the solution i looked into earlier didn't seem to work in the end. I've also just tried reverting drivers to a previous version and just encountered the same issue and ive just about exhausted all my ideas on things to try.

Hi,

Could you check that your cache folder is not full? Otherwise, can you try deactivating the SVT in your preferences? 

I hope this helps, if you have any questions feel free to ask.

Kind Regards,

Geoffroy SC