Photoshop CC 2015 Drops Support for Intel HD 3000, Downgrade to Restore GPU Acceleration
Adobe/Photoshop decided it would be a good idea for me to update to Photoshop CC 2015, despite the newer version apparently dropping support for Intel HD 3000 GPU which is in my somewhat old laptop. Unfortunately this means no GPU accelerated processing, causing major slowdown in many Photoshop activities. In Photoshop CC 2015 the option to use the GPU is simply unavailable out (P.S. I am on Windows 10, not sure if this is the case in Windows 7 or 8):
Quite fortunately, Adobe Creative Cloud (that annoying program always bugging you to update), allows you to install prior versions of Photoshop and other apps (and maintain simultaneous installations of different versions, which is nice). I was able to roll back to Photoshop CC 2014 to restore support for Intel HD 3000 GPU on my Asus UX31E laptop (2011) running Windows 10. The latest version of Illustrator CC 2015 also took away my GPU support and this technique should work the same (and for other CC apps), so long as you can roll back to a version which previously supported your GPU.
Here’s how to do it (this is on Creative Cloud 3.5.1.209, not sure when they added this function so if you can’t see it, you may need to update Creative Cloud):
Open Creative Cloud > Apps Tab > Find Additional Apps section > Click ‘All Apps’ button in header bar of that section > Select ‘View Previous Versions’
Now when you click the install button you will see a drop-down list of the available versions. At the time of writing, I have access to CC 2015, CC 2014, CC, and CS6 versions of Photoshop. Some apps go back further, or not as far, depending upon their history. Installing an older versions o Photoshop will not remove the current version which could be nice in some edge cases, but it seems this may not be the same behavior between all CC apps so make sure to read the prompts. (when upgrading from the very latest version to a brand new release however, be careful to check the box to keep the old version if you want it).
After installing Photoshop CC 2014, the ‘Use Graphics Processor’ setting is one again available for Intel HD 3000:
Note: Adobe Creative Cloud may prompt you to update Photoshop CC 2014, which I would suggesting doing (this is actually an update for CC 2014, NOT and upgrade to CC 2015).