Brush flickering to arrow when drawing on a layer with a mask in Photoshop 27.9.1

Solved: Disabling “Enable Generator” fixed the brush cursor flickering to the Windows arrow

I believe I have finally identified the cause of this issue, at least in my environment.

Solution

Go to:

Preferences > Plugins > uncheck “Enable Generator”

After disabling Generator, the cursor flickering completely stopped.

I was also able to reproduce the issue consistently:

Generator OFF → No flickering
Generator ON → Flickering occurs
Generator OFF again → Flickering disappears

The problem was especially noticeable when painting on or working with layers that had pixel layer masks enabled. The brush cursor would briefly change to the standard Windows arrow while painting.

How I found the cause

I had been experiencing this issue for a long time and tested many possible causes, including GPU acceleration, OpenCL, GPU compositing, cache levels, cache tile size, document resolution, number of layers, and various layer mask settings.

Some settings, particularly Cache Levels, seemed to affect how frequently the flickering occurred, but none of them were the root cause. The issue could also occur with GPU acceleration completely disabled.

Eventually, I replaced my current Photoshop settings folder with a backup from a time when the problem was not occurring. The flickering disappeared completely, even in a large working document.

I then compared the working and problematic preference files and narrowed the difference down to MachinePrefs.psp.

Replacing only the working MachinePrefs.psp with the problematic version immediately brought the flickering back.

Comparing the settings stored in the two files revealed this difference:

Working: generatorEnabled = OFF
Problematic: generatorEnabled = ON

I then tested this directly in Photoshop by changing only the Enable Generator option. Turning it ON caused the problem, and turning it OFF fixed it again.

I had actually enabled Generator recently because I needed to use Photoshop’s image asset generation feature, but I had completely forgotten about changing this setting.

So, if you are experiencing a similar issue where the brush cursor briefly flickers to the Windows arrow—especially when working with layer masks—I strongly recommend trying:

Preferences > Plugins > Disable “Enable Generator”

This may not be the cause of every cursor-flickering issue, but in my case the Generator setting was reproducibly responsible for it.

​@AxelMatt So here is a strange thing : the bug disappeared when i reset preferences, all well and good. And then I upgraded to photoshop 27.10 and the bug reappears ! And it stays when i downgrade to 26.9.1… I had to reset preferences again. I think it’s linked to some preset especially but I can’t figure which.

Unfortunately you haven't given us any information about your system. Therefore, all proposed solutions are a look into the crystal ball

Please provide a copy of your 'System Info'. This can be get from the Photoshop menu item Help > System Info. There's a copy button in the System Info dialog. Press this button and paste the info into a text file and attach it to your next forum post.

In the meantime try to reset the Photoshop preferences

https://helpx.adobe.com/ie/photoshop/using/preferences.html#Manually

Remember to back up your settings before doing the preference reset

https://helpx.adobe.com/ie/photoshop/using/preset-migration.html

Try also to disable the option to "Use Graphics Procesor" from Photoshop by going to Preferences, then Performance. Once done, quit & relaunch Photoshop to check if that helps.

If it helps, you can check out the steps suggested here:   https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/kb/troubleshoot-gpu-graphics-card.html