Adobe Photoshop CS5 GPU Acceleration Issues

One of the touted features of Adobe Photoshop CS4/CS5 is the program's ability to utilize GPU acceleration using OpenGL for some of the rendering applications and redrawing the screen. This could prove useful for avid users of some of the more graphically intensive tools in Photoshop; however, I have encountered major problems with utilizing my notebook GPU to boost performance. In fact, with my nVidia Quadro 3100m, using GPU acceleration compromises both performance and stability, regardless of the amount of VRAM I allocate for the program. I frequently experience application slowdown, "disk errors", and "out of RAM" messages when working with a canvas.

After spending some time reinstalling and re-downloading the software to verify that the installation contents were in no way corrupted, a little intuition drove me to play with the GPU acceleration settings, since the memory and hard drive were certainly not to blame. Reading up on the Adobe GPU and OpenGL Support page at the Adobe website, I find that there is great potential for problems when using this option, and so far the only stopgap solution I have found is to simply disable GPU acceleration altogether. So far, the Intel i-540m is working quite well at processing all graphical tasks, though I feel like I am unable to take advantage of a potentially useful feature in Photoshop CS5.

I am using the latest WHQL display drivers from nVidia, 257.21, so I do not expect that the driver itself is causing the issues, though I have not tested other drivers to make sure. I am wondering if others with mobile GPUs, particularly the nVidia 210m/310m/3100m, have had any better experiences, or have found a solution to the instability caused by enabling GPU acceleration.

 

i have used ps cs5 64bit and it seems stable to me. i have gpu acceleration on, i use 197.16 and my vidcard is a 280m.
however i only do touchups and the usuall content-aware fill. i havent tried using it with complex layers etc.
although i havent benchmarked it, it seems that gpu accleration will give marginal benefits at best, at least for the stuff i use it with (including hdr pro). like you said just disbale it and you are good to go.

 

You could always try increasing the amount of virtual memory, it may help with the out of memory error. Performance wise, it may help with the disk errors by reducing the hard drive thrashing.

 

Just as an update to this issue, I decided to revert back to the stock 189.74 WHQL nVidia Quadro drivers hosted by Dell. At one point, I experienced a BSOD with the 256 series, and so I figured there must be some compatibility issues that still need to be ironed out on the nVidia 3100m. These drivers are incredibly stable and provide support for GPU acceleration in Photoshop (note that I am running in the "Normal" setting for the OpenGL setting). I am uncertain whether this series offers any GPU acceleration support for Flash 10.1, but for the sake of stability, I am perfectly willing to compromise. Besides, I frankly do not make enough use of flash to justify the update.

 

Yep if you have issues with a supported gpu its the drivers causing the problem.