PHOTOSHOP BAD PERFORMANCE - ARTBOARDS - MOVING AND MORE

Can someone with actual technical knowledge of Photoshop explain what has changed internally with Artboards in recent versions?

I am not looking for generic troubleshooting steps. I am trying to understand the technical reason behind what appears to be a significant performance regression in Photoshop's Artboard implementation.

The problem

In Photoshop Beta and recent Photoshop releases, basic Artboard operations are extremely slow.

• Creating a new Artboard can freeze the entire Photoshop UI for several seconds.

• Deleting an Artboard can freeze Photoshop for several seconds.

• Duplicating or reorganizing Artboards can introduce noticeable delays.

• As the document becomes more complex, Artboard-related operations seem to become progressively slower.

During these pauses, Photoshop is effectively unresponsive. This does not feel like normal rendering latency — it feels like Photoshop is performing some synchronous document-wide operation every time the Artboard structure changes.

Why did this work properly in older Photoshop versions?

This is the part I would particularly like someone to explain.

In Photoshop versions from around 2017–2018, Artboards were extremely responsive. Creating or deleting an Artboard was practically instantaneous, even on hardware that was dramatically slower than modern systems.

Almost a decade later, I am using a high-end PC, and the situation is actually worse.

Photoshop itself often feels unnecessarily slow despite running on hardware with far more CPU performance, GPU performance, RAM capacity and storage bandwidth than systems available when Artboards were originally introduced.

Upgrading hardware does not seem to meaningfully solve the problem.

That raises an obvious technical question:

Why does an operation that was essentially instantaneous in older Photoshop versions now block the application for several seconds on significantly faster hardware?

What changed internally?

I would be interested in knowing whether modern Photoshop performs additional operations when the Artboard hierarchy changes, for example:

• recalculating the entire document structure,

• rebuilding internal Artboard or layer relationships,

• refreshing the complete Layers panel hierarchy,

• recalculating compositing data,

• regenerating previews or thumbnails,

• recalculating canvas bounds,

• synchronizing metadata,

• performing GPU-related synchronization,

• updating Smart Objects or linked resources,

• recalculating color-management data,

• or executing some other document-wide dependency update.

Another possibility is that some part of the Artboard processing is still effectively single-threaded or synchronous, meaning that additional CPU cores or a faster GPU provide little benefit because Photoshop is blocking its main UI thread while completing the operation.

If that is the case, it would also explain why throwing increasingly powerful hardware at Photoshop does not proportionally improve responsiveness.

This looks like a performance regression, not a hardware limitation

That distinction is important.

If the same basic Artboard operations were instantaneous in much older Photoshop versions running on substantially weaker computers, but now cause multi-second UI stalls on high-end modern hardware, then simply saying that Photoshop needs more resources does not explain the behavior.

Something in the application's architecture, document processing pipeline, Artboard implementation, or UI synchronization appears to have changed.

So my question is not:

"How do I make Photoshop faster?"

My question is:

What changed between the older Photoshop Artboard implementation and the current implementation that makes creating, deleting and managing Artboards significantly more computationally expensive?

I would especially appreciate an explanation from someone familiar with Photoshop's internal architecture or from Adobe engineering.

I simply want to understand why Photoshop can be running on hardware many times faster than what existed in 2017–2018, yet basic document operations can feel considerably slower than they did back then.