P: Photoshop 25.0 Graphics Processor Compatibility Check fails: Unknown GPU

That is only an intermediary solution, since I only andy especially renewed my PS subscription because of the new AI functions and filters that I now cannot use since I am stuck with an older version of Photoshop because of this GPU bug.

I like several of the new features like AI generative fill in the new Ps version. However, I did fine without them before and having to turn off GPU acceleration for Ps to be stable is not a good solution. I appreciate that the devs are working on this and giving good feedback on the issue, but can we get a toggle in the settings to disable the new features that are causing crashes? Or can you roll those features back to the beta release until the bugs are worked out? Will some folks be upset that a feature got rolled back, yes. But if an update is causing issues it needs to be brought back to the drawing board. There are professionals the depend on the adobe suite to make a living. 

I can confrim and I have already said that before - it was introduced at some time when PS25 beta update comes. In early betas it was OK, no issues.

And at some point this was migrated to PS24 latest updates - it not working also.

Plus we get new introduced BUG with affecting After Effects start, from latest PS25 BETA. 

I'm even more scared now to update BETA, to not break other software. And may be this Bug will be migrated to PS24 also 😕😕

I have just one question - where is QA team?

@Mark.Dahm As i said, I have sympathies for devs, since I am one myself. However: This worked in Photoshop up to and including 24 without any problem whatsoever. Since I did not change my system, the problem was introduced in PS 25.

So - in 25.5 Beta no fixes still. This is for info.

BUT, there is a HUGE BUT - we GET NASTY BUG. 

After installing latest BETA build - After Effects 24/23 stops opening at "Clean Up Smart Mask interpolation".

After uninstalling latest BETA build of Photoshop - AE start to work again.

There is something wrong with that.

The GPU is designed to blast through many threaded operations very fast, then dump the results out at the end. Calculating polygons (what many graphics apps rely on GPUs to do for games and rendering) can be threaded across GPUs efficiently, establishing a clear performance boost vs CPU.

But not all things work faster on a GPU, at least for Photoshop, so we use a scalpel to introduce GPU features when apps who never mastered the CPU can just use a sledgehammer; Photoshop needs the GPU to hold image state data in the GPU so that it can have GPU based algorithms run and render results. Sometimes the overhead of copying that data from CPU to GPU costs more than the speed up from GPU based processing, and it isn't worth it. Over the years, Photoshop had mastered CPU processing strategies, and to use the GPU, it must be clearly faster than the CPU alternative, otherwise it's a step backward.

The difficulty Photoshop has with multiple GPUs is how it can mainstain a steady enough machine state so that it's GPU accelerated functions can render the right results on the in-memory image data held in the GPU. Other apps can just flush all their work over to the GPU and never have to worry about persistent image data. Because other graphics apps use the GPU in a different manner than Photoshop, there should be differences in the operational expectations. 

We are still working on making these challenging GPU configurations work better, but this information might be helpful to set expectations that not all programs capable of using the GPU share the same architecture or needs.

@Mark.Dahm While I appreciate that you try to help and communicate here:

I have four monitors. It is not possible to connect them all to one graphics card and it also makes no sense not to balance the load to two GPUs.

Also, as I explained earlier, I have already done all things from all Adobe help articles on this and nothing helped.

I want to stress again: Since it worked up to PS23 and up to early versions of PS24 this is definitely notr a problem with my system, it is an Adobe problem.

@PanBeep ,

I simultaneously like and dislike that analogy, but not because it doesn't feel true.  🙂

There are low level frameworks, used here and there, that have been useful for cross platform development that platform providers are not motivated to provide. For example, Save for Web (Legacy) is built on a framework that is also used for Liquify and Adobe Camera Raw. It predated GPU, and therefore utilized all CPU processing primitives. That doesn't sound like a huge deal, but writing a program to run with a GPU is a different thing entirely than CPU. We introduced some GPU capability to speed up Liquify, and Adobe Camera Raw is reworking some of the framework now to handle GPU, but we still bump into instability with how Camera Raw makes decisions about GPU hardware and how Photoshop does it; there is a lot of nuance and differences between things that are there for good reasons, but they come with some active management.

More modern components in Photoshop are in the process of being upgraded to tap into more GPU processing reserves, and things like the main canvas (with rulers, grids, floating widgets), Oil Paint filter all have operational GPU modes that do that; the feature 'Deactivate Native Canvas' was added so you could switch back to the classic GL backed canvas if needed, but the current canvas works natively on Metal and DX12+.

We also recently shipped (last year) GPU compositing, speeding up the compositing portion of screen display by about 200% (ymmv, depending on the kinds of files you work with in Ps). We briefly had to turn it off to fix a compatiblity issue, and some folks instantly recognized the slowdown that reverting to the former CPU-based compositing caused. It's on now by default.

We are also working actively in the areas of machine learning to put modern solutions behind our own generative fill features.

I am working on a large effort now to speed up a whole range of things in Photoshop by using more modern approaches to programming that will probably initially be launched in the Beta just to make sure that we have the stability we need before releasing for everybody; the numbers are pretty great, but stability is paramount. This usually means there will be a switch somewhere in Tech Previews to try some new feature or not.

So the answer is both yes and no; multiple GPUs has always presented a challenge to Photoshop, even to the point of advertising this on our system requirements. Bringing stability to that scenario will depend more on the speed of us modernizing architecture than band-aiding existing code.

@Mark.Dahm does Photoshop take advantage of modern hardware and modern software frameworks? Working on some of Adobe software like PS or AE feels like having a Lamborghini which has a constant handbrake being turned on.

We do state the following here: