Always opens files in Camera Raw and takes for ever.

[Eric the gray]

I’ve been running Photoshop CC for years without any trouble. I have not used it for the last few weeks or so and in the mean time there have been several upgrades of PS and Windows 10. For whatever reason I now find that while PS starts OK it now always starts in Camera Raw. I don’t mind that but I have not been able to turn that off. Even worse, it takes more than 2 hours to load an image. I don’t actually know how long as I give up at that point. When I load a 30Mb NEF file the image may appear after 2 or 3 minutes but the editing sliders remain locked and unresponsive. The Windows task manager shows that one processor core (out of 12) is running at 100% and it will continue to do this until I shut down Photoshop. Most times I cannot shut down photoshop in the usual manner but have to end the task in Task Manager. On occasion I can close Camera Raw and then I can shutdown Photoshop normally.

[JJMack]

In your ACR Preferences Performance section try disabling  GPU support adobe has change their GPU support  it may the your gpu is not being used correctly Adobe has change machine requirements.

[Eric the gray]

GPU setting was on Auto and is now Off. GPU = GeForce GTX 1070. That seemed to make a difference, but only minimal. The image still opened in ACR but, I think, more quickly. Fully functioning editing sliders were still not available even after about ten minutes. One CPU core only, continued to be fully at work. Some of the graphics memory was in use and there were occasional barely visible twitches of activity in various parts of the GPU.

[Eric the gray]

I have made progress since writing the above but still have not solved my problem.
From the beginning I noticed that Photoshop seemed to be using only one core (out of 12) of the processor but then I discovered that when I started to load a raw file into PS Windows Explorer would start running and placing a significant load on the rest of the cores. I also discovered that Windows Error Reporting was running at a high rate with its power usage described as ‘high’. Eventually I tracked down Intel TBMT (Turbo Boost Max Technology) as being the source of the pat of my problem. With TBMT turned off the CPU uses all cores and Windows Explorer does not run wild. But even so PS is still slow. Even when it loads an image the action of ACR sliders is slow and and sticky, and the use of ACR is nowhere near as easy as it is working on the same file with Lightroom. My basic problem remains that PS always opens files in ACR and takes forever to become useable.

This only a recent problem. It does not lie in ACR which runs prefectly well in Lightroom. It has something to do with TBMT but the problem is specific to PS. There is probably nothing I can do about it until either Adobe of Microsoft come up with a fix.

[Eric the gray]

I have finally solved my problem. I have Acronis backup software and the problem went away when I stopped the "Acronis Active Protection" software.

I have been running Photoshop CC in conjunction with the Acronis software for several years and have only recently started to have this problem. There have been several updates in both Adobe Creative Cloud and Windows 10 (but none in Acronis) at about the time I first noticed the problem but unfortunately I cannot associate the onset of the problem with any particular one.