photoshop 2026 extremely poor performance issues with GPU enabled on good pc
Photoshop 2026 been slowing down worse and worse with every update, and after some testing I’ve found that the performance is significantly better when GPU is disabled (but still pretty poor), and also significantly better in the 2025 version. I remember the versions before 2025 ran significantly better as well and figured that the performance issues in the 2025 version would get patched with time but now with 2026 versions it has gotten so bad that its becoming almost unusable for digital painting.
My computer is well above the recommended specs with a compatible GPU for photoshop and can run most AAA games at high specs with no problem and runs great when doing 3D modeling in blender but struggles with even tiny file sizes in photoshop. for example if i make a tiny 64x64 pixel canvas in photoshop 2026 and simply attempt to pan and zoom a blank canvas, my GPU and CPU show over 80% usage and i get what looks like less than 2FPS with screen tearing. When I attempt to draw or resize layers there is an extremely noticeable delay behind my input and what’s displayed. also now when I try to used keyboard shortcut to change tools, it’s doing the hot swap action switching back to the previous tool the way it would if I was holding down the shortcut key for several seconds then releasing, even though I am just briefly tapping the keys.
I tried completely wiping photoshop and all my settings and doing a fresh install just incase i was carrying some bad data from older versions but that did nothing to help the performance. While disabling GPU helps the bad performance, it doesn't help enough to justify the loss of features that aren’t supported when GPU is disabled. I’ve tried everything I could find about improving performance in photoshop an nothing has helped at all beside installing the oldest version available which is the 2025 version. If I could install the 2020 version through creative cloud im sure it would run 100x better because I remember not having any performance issues before the AI features started being added in. I also know this issues is becoming wide spread because I’ve been seeing more and more posts about the same performance issues al over reddit.
I’m running the the most current version of photoshop on Microsoft surface laptop studio, 32 GB ram, plenty of free space on my 2T of internal storage, with a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 Ti laptop GPU and Intel iris Xe graphics dual GPU, and yes i have tested swapping which graphics card is used by photoshop, and i have the latest NVIDIA studio driver installed, and most up to date windows 11 and all its latest drivers.
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