Meta Quest 3 Remote Desktop Driver affecting performance of Photoshop on Laptop

[anthonySS]

This is a PSA since I do graphic design professionally and the past 2 days have been unproductive while I troubleshoot very poor photoshop performance.

The short version is that my laptop has an rtx 4070 in it and intel integrated graphics, pretty standard setup. Photoshop can see and correctly selects the 4070, but looking at the utilization, it's not being used at all. Performance was terrible and hardly usable.

I tried many things to track down the issue but I finally did. After popping into Illustrator and looking at the list of GPUs in the performance tab I noticed a new display adapter:

Meta Virtual Monitor

this is installed when using the quests remote desktop or potentially horizon workrooms. It was installed on my computer without me knowing and was confusing photoshop causing poor performance. Even after everything I did to force my dedicated gpu in photoshop it refused to use it when this display adapter was active.

Disabling it in device manager fixed the issue. I hope this helps anyone who needs it.

Version 26.11.0 release

Windows 11 24H2 build 26100.6725

Basic steps: complete setup for Meta remote desktop/ horizon workrooms and install the meta remote desktop windows app

Expected result: photoshop should correctly identify display adapters and allow you to choose such adapters like an rtx 4070
Actual result: this driver confuses photoshop and even when reporting that its using the rtx 4070 it is not and using the meta remote desktop display adapter. 

[D Fosse]

There is unfortunately no way for Photoshop to choose which GPU is being called. This all happens on system level, on laptops further complicated by manufacturer modifications to the OS and drivers.

If there was, this problem would have ceased to exist long ago. The Adobe engineers are acutely aware of the dual GPU problem.

What you can do, and this is the standard procedure, is to disable secondary GPUs in the operating system. 

https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/kb/troubleshoot-gpu-graphics-card.html