Select-and-mask speed slowdown? (Anyone else notice a difference after upgrading from Big Sur?)

[tonsure]

Unfortunately, I was forced to upgrade from MacOS Big Sur to Monterey (and to thus to upgrade my version of Photoshop to 23.4.2). Ever since doing so, I've noticed a signficant lag-time when performing simple masks on images. My workflow as a bookseller: using the magic wand to select the contour of a book image shot against white background, and then right-clicking "Select inverse" and then "Select and mask." Upon choosing that last command, it now seems to take 3-5 times as long for PS to perform the operation (and have the OK dialog pop-up with the preview of what the new image will look like). I'm using an M1 Macbook with 8GB memory (and 8 graphic cores), so this really shouldn't be such an onerous task. But, as mentioned, the time lag has been noticeably increased since upgrading to Monterey and the latest PS version. Any suggestions?

[D Fosse]

Select and Mask is one of those functions that rely heavily on the GPU.

The entire GPU code is in rapid transition these days, because the old OpenGL framework it was previously based on, is no longer supported in MacOS or Windows. So it's all being rewritten for Metal on Mac, DirectX on Windows.

Not sure how you approach GPU problems on Mac (on Windows you would just update the driver or even replace the card itself) - but one thing you can try is Preferences > Technology Previews > Deactivate native canvas. This may not be a permanent solution, but in the meantime GPU wrinkles may be ironed out by either Apple and/or Adobe.

Oh, BTW, 8 GB RAM is very little and well below recommended for Photoshop, especially if it's "unified memory", which just means the GPU will eat up a large chunk of it. Effectively, you have perhaps 4-5 GB system RAM available for Photoshop. It should still run as long as you have sufficient scratch disk space, but it won't be very efficient.

[tonsure]

Many thanks for the info. Unfortunately, the "Deactivate native canvas" trick didn't seem to make much of a difference. But it's good to know about the larger issue of transitioning-code; makes sense that an OS upgrade would be the cause for some kind of conflict (leading to the slowdown). What's unfortunate/ironic is that when I was test-driving my M1 Macbook (to judge whether the 8GB RAM version was sufficient), I actually was using Select & Mask as a benchmark task. Because it was incredibly snappy (and almost instanteous), I figured that 8GB would be sufficient. But now that the performance has suffered after the OS upgrade, I'm really regretting not paying a few hundred bucks more to go with a higher amount of RAM (since it can't be upgraded in M1 Macs). Really frustrating.