Photoshop is too slow for concept art. Any way to improve it?

[Pentotark]

Photoshop is well known to be an industry standard in both animation and videogame industry for the production of concept art. And for good reason, the program is really powerful and can be upgraded with plugins and tools.

Is it just me (and my ultimately distorted perception) or Photoshop is just slow, laggy and frequently freezing to anyone who makes concept art with it? And to me it seems the computer hardware you throw at it does't really matter, if you are using a 4 cores / 4 threads core or an 8 cores / 16 threads, an integrated graphcis or a powerful RTX 2080ti, it doesn't makes a big difference and the program runs sluggish on any 500-1500$ computer.

I am trying to find information online about this issue, because I am tired of upgrading my pc to see no imporvements in performace, especially when using custom brushes (official ones, like Kyle's brushes, dowloaded from Adobe itself).

Does any of you have insights or experience to help me get a faster, snappier user experience?

[D Fosse]

The most common causes for performance problems are buggy video drivers, or third-party plugins, extensions, font managers and so on. If you see this on several machines, you need to look at what they have in common, like any software or app or utility that you have installed on all of them.

If you have a laptop with dual graphics, that's always trouble. Photoshop interacts with the GPU a lot, and it needs to know which GPU it's talking to. This is two-way communication.

How big are the files you're working on? Not file size on disk, but pixel dimensions. How many layers?

Photoshop isn't CPU-intensive. Basically any CPU will do just fine. The limiting factor is bandwidth. In practical terms that boils down to your scratch disk setup. You need to have lots of free space on your selected scratch disk, and it should be on your fastest drive.

[Pentotark]

My two photoshop installations are pretty much vanilla. The only thing I added are Kyle's brushes and tools, they are official Adobe tools downloadable from inside the program itself.

I work on two PCs: one with a i6700K/32GB ram/gtx1070, the other one a Ryzen 1500/16GB ram/gtx 1050. The power is plenty. The first one should be much faster than the second.

File size I work on can vary: from small A4 illustrations to big ones that can reach pixel limit (such as background art). Same for level count, I both work on few layers or up to hundreds when doing backgrounds. But no matter the size o layer count, brush management can be laggy and slow for modern standards. Programs as Procreate or Clip studio are very responsive but they are not industry standard.

Scratch disks are on a dedicated 1TB nvme SSD, it is very fast storage.

To be clear, its not like PS is unusable. With some brushes its snappy, with more complex ones it can be very slow, freezing at times for minutes. And that has happened for years on many different machines. What is puzzling me is that hardware seems to make any difference, with both older or newer computers the user experience is more or less the same in years and I am wondering if PS is just badly optimized for windows or just me missing something big.

[D Fosse]

If it's mainly brushes, it's the video driver. The card itself can handle it, but GeForce drivers are notoriously buggy because they're developed for gamers. As long as the latest games will run, everybody's happy and the money comes in. Photoshop is a fringe market.

NVidia make Quadros, and AMD make Radeon Pros, for the graphics market, 3D and CAD. They are usually more reliable in Photoshop.

That said, really large brushes (several thousand pixels) will always see a little delay. But it should still be workable.

[Pentotark]

So your suggestion would be to buy a quadro or a radeon pro? In that case, do you know of any resource talking about how these cards can help with my situation ? I would like to read about it before purchase.

[D Fosse]

Try to update your current drivers first. I don't want the blame if you buy an expensive card and nothing changes 😉

It's only meant as general info. These Quadro and Radeon Pro cards exist, and they are generally more reliable. I made the switch to Quadro some years ago, and haven't had a single issue since then. For what that's worth.

[Pentotark]

I am already running the drivers to their latest version since they came out. Nvidia lounched studio driver too a couple months ago, I might try those.

Thank you for your feedback and experience.

[Pentotark]

I did a clean install of the Nvidia studio drivers but I cannot perceive any difference in performance so far. I'll keep them for a while to see if at least it can solve PS occasional freezing.

[c.pfaffenbichler]

The most generic advice on Photoshop Performance would probably be here: 

https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/kb/optimize-photoshop-cc-performance.html

As for the Brushes: Does turning off Smoothing make adifference? 

[Pentotark]

Smoothing doesn't impact performance much. What it does is adding an extra delay that is funcional to calculate the smoothed stroke.

I know very well the page you liked. I've always found it not very useful. Funny to find there the same advices from back in the CS2 days...

[c.pfaffenbichler]

Well, you might save yourself that delay then. 

As for the page I linked to it may not have helped you mucg but it contains some pertinent points that might well serve unexpierienced users – like setting a Scratch Disk in the first place or reducing History steps. 

Some Photoshop users seem to stick with nonsensichal default settings for a long time … 

[Eastaman]

I’m tired of hearing people blaming video drivers. There’s only one culprit and it’s windows 10. Install release 1803 and disable all automatic updates. Then install your GPU drivers and photoshop as normal. For reference CS6 is still the fastest and most responsive photoshop version for concept art. Hope this helps.

[Pentotark]

To me honestly it is really obvious that the issue is optimization of photoshop brushes and windows 10. While the brushes lags and takes up to many seconds to complete a stroke on really powerful machines, gpu and cpu usages are very low. Bechmarks says differently but all the benchmarks arounds are targeted to photo editing and not brush use. I wish Adobe decides to give a shot at looking into this issue. Blaming drivers or hardware for a popular and well used software as PS I think is a bit of a stretch.

That said, what you suggest is good. I cannot get back to a previous windows but I can install cs6 and migrate my brushes and tools there and see if I get some benefit.

Thank you.

[PECourtejoie]

Hello, Pentodark, which version of Photoshop are you using now, and were you using when you create the thread?

[Pentotark]

Right now I use 21.0.3. I did not updated the software since I started the thread so I guess I was on the same version. Tho this issue is running for quite a few years now.

Bottomline, photoshop on my i7 with 32GB of ram, GTX 1070 and a SSD is running slightly better than my 6 years old laptop: a dual core, 8GB ram with integrated graphics. Seems to me like hardware specs do not matter at all. PS seems much faster on photo editing tools but somehow the brush handling feels slow and sluggish as always. Concept artists like me grew to accept the issue by now but I wonder if something can be done.