Summary (putting all the relevent info from the thread here in case someone else has a lag problem you can find it all up here)
1) Scratchdisks: make sure you have enough free space! Also, SSD's are not good to use for scratchdisk. They make things slow down a lot, and it will lower the lifetime of your SSD by constantly writing data.
2) Play with cache preferences
3) Reduce number of 'Undo' states to be saved
(original message below)
I got a new pc laptop a while back, 8gb of ram, i5 processor, 64 bit windows 10, photoshop CC, Wacom Intuos.
Seems like everything should run fine but photoshop just lags like crazy. I use the Lazy Nezumi plugin, which causes more lag but even without it it's just such a grind to draw and paint... if I make strokes too quickly (hatching or something) this thick black line just appears on my screen. I had to disable all the open GL stuff so no rotating or graphic colour eyedropper since if I use that the whole program just hangs for 30 seconds.
I'm sure my system should be able to handle photoshop. It happens on big and small canvases, with big and small brushes. It happens if I am working on just the background layer or if I have many layers.
I am sure there are some settings somewhere I can do to make it work right... anyone have any ideas or experiencing similar problems, or a link to some thread that gives some options to try? (I've googled the problem but end up with stuff that hasn't worked)
I have no computer tech savvy or whatnot, but have you tried looking at property of your graphics card and see if it is the default for Photoshop? I forgot how to check that, you'll have to google it. Also, did you give PS a big chunk of disc space for Scratch Disc? This one can be found in PS's Properties.
Hey meat, thanks for the suggestions. I think it is to do with scratch disk since my HDD doesn't have much space. Work around for now is to use a small canvas and not have too many layers (makes it somewhat stable). I'll check the graphics properties too! Thanks again : )
Hey Jonny! Probably trying different cache preferences could do the trick, I had a week of terrible lags with Photoshop just a few weeks back. And after I almost gave up I tried out to adjust the different cache settings and it worked! It was not my graphics card after all :) Hope it does the trick for you, too! Oh and restart PS every time you change something related to hardware settings!
(01-29-2016, 04:54 AM)JyonnyNovice Wrote: Hey meat, thanks for the suggestions. I think it is to do with scratch disk since my HDD doesn't have much space. Work around for now is to use a small canvas and not have too many layers (makes it somewhat stable). I'll check the graphics properties too! Thanks again : )
My HDD was broken awhile back, which resulted in not being able to use photoshop of anything consuming too much for the RAM I had in my computer.
When the computer runs out of RAM (working memory) it will put the rest on the HDD. Well and if the HDD is broken or full it cannot put the data there. Since photoshop consumes a lot of MB just to run and even more with several layers, bigger layers and files the lack of space on your HDD might be the problem.
So cleaning that one up, or maybe more RAM might solve it as well. I would starting with cleaning it up to see if it helps. Don't buy stuff you might don't need :P
Edit; Do you have an HDD in the laptop or an SSD? That might influence things to.
Thanks for the advice Eyliana! I should have enough RAM I think, 8GB should be ok... 16GB is more ideal but I don't use all kinds of smart layers and huge res photos or anything. I do have an SSD, I managed to clear it up a little so I have 16GB free - I think it's still not enough. Too many tutorial videos, art books and reference images on my disk >.< maybe I should get an external drive to store all that stuff.
There is a difference in how SSD's and HDD's behave. HDD is an optical drive that spins and doesn't have problems with writing a lot of data on it. Doesn't influence the performance on the long term.
SSD are cells, when there is a lot of writing data on the cells will degrade. As a result one of the standard settings is that they want to prevent that. So what they do is say that everything should be processed on the RAM instead of writing it to the SSD.
8 RAM and HDD is not a problem, since they don't have a problem with writing the additional data to the HDD. With the SSD they don't want that.
I have a program (Samsung Magican, since I have samsung drive) were I can manage the settings of the SSD. There I can select a setting that allows writing from the RAM to the SSD. It will degrade the SSD a bit faster, but you will be able to use photoshop normally. So maybe try to find that setting somewhere? Things should work better then :).
I know all this because I replaced the broken HDD with and SSD and suddenly it was complaining to run out of RAM (also 8GB) by photoshop or modelling while I hadn't this probelm with the HDD :P.
Oh! I didn't know that stuff! Thanks for the info. I found a program called SSD tweaker, but not sure what setting to use (I just hit 'auto tweek' which feels like some kind of placebo). I will try it out with photoshop soon and see how it's going (and try to clear more disk space too...)
You should store your files on a separate HDD, and not on the precious SSD. I don't know if this makes a difference, but I run Photoshop out of the SSD Drive, but set PS's scratch disc to my much larger HDD.
You're right, I think I will buy an external HDD for my files since I'm constantly juggling stuff around on USB sticks and stuff and if it will help my SSD last longer and let me work properly in photoshop it seems worth it. Thanks again for all the help!
Just an update on this, in case anyone else has a similar problem using an SSD only laptop, and having photoshop lag / crashing issues. I bought an external HDD, really cheap for even a huge 1TB, it solved all my problems. I can use all the GPU features like rotate and the on screen colour eye dropper, can work on huge canvases with many layers and haven't had any crashes and barely any lag.
Definitely better to use an HDD for photoshop scratch disk.
Not sure if has been mentioned or not but try toning down the history states. I set it to 4, which lets me undo the last 3 moves. Since then it almost never lagged again. That's more than enough if you think about it and has the benefit of putting you into the mindset of thinking ahead and making forward progress all the time, like you would in traditional media. cheers!
