Brush Lag Cintiq Tried Everything

[WinterHarvest]

As the title says, when I attempt to draw in Photoshop, my brush lags significantly in a way that is impossible to work with. When moving the pen around at an average speed, the line appears behind it in short bursts with a few seconds between. This began about a week ago although I had not opened Photoshop for a while beforehand. 

This is only happening with Photoshop and only with my Cintiq. There is no lag when using the Cintiq with another drawing software, and no lag when using my older Intuos with Photoshop. I draw with fairly simple brushes on lower resolution canvases.

My specs:

Laptop- MSI GS65 Stealth 9SE

OS- Windows 11

Tablet- Wacom Cintiq Pro 24 P

Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060

CPU: Intel i7

The main things I have tried since the problem began:

- Updated Photoshop from 2024 to 2025

- Updated Wacom driver

- Updated NVIDIA driver

- Made sure GeForce overlay was turned off

- Made sure Photoshop was still set to use the NVIDIA card

- Made sure I had a decent amount of free disk space

- Turned off brush smoothing

- Changed PS memory usage from 70% to 80%

- Deleted and fresh installed PS with none of my brushes or preferences

The only thing that made the brush lag go away was going to Edit>Preferences>Performance and unticking the box "Use Graphics Processor", but this causes the whole program to display wrong and lag in many other ways, such as when panning across the canvas. 

Is there anything else I can do? I have tried anything relevant I could find from searching. 

[Sameer K]

Hey, @WinterHarvest. Welcome to the Photoshop Community. Kudos to you for listing the steps that you've tried already. I'll help you figure this out. 

You've covered all the basic stuff already; the issue may be in the wilds. Here are a few things you can try:
1 - Your laptop has a mini-display port with higher bandwidth than the HDMI 2.1. Could you try switching to the Mini-display port? 

2— If you'd like to stick to HDMI, swap the cable out for a different one and see how it goes. 

Also, could you try limiting the refresh rate for the Wacom device to 60hz? 

Let me know how it goes. Thanks!

Sameer K

(Type '@' and type my name to mention me when you reply)

[WinterHarvest · Accepted solution]

Hello @Sameer K , both very good ideas. I have actually already been using the mini-display port and forgot there was an HDMI cable. As it turns out though, the problem seems to have been related to me recently updating my Oculus Quest drivers and app. I deleted all the Oculus/Meta stuff off my computer and Photoshop works fine again. Leaving this here in case someone else finds the thread later. Thank you for your help as well.