Substance Painter frequently using 100% of my GPU

Ashervisalis

I was working inside UE4 a few days ago, and when I hit Play, my screen went black and I reset my computer. Now, UE4 works just fine, no issues. Same with Maya. (I've honestly got no clue if these programs use the same processing source as Painter). Now, when I use Painter, it frequently consumes 70%-100% of my GPU (see below). It happens when I open a project, select a different texture set, rearrange on the stack, and sometimes when I'm just painting. SP will freeze for approximately 20-30 seconds, and my computer becomes unusable during this time. I've been experiencing this for approximately 5 days now.

SP was just crashing, but I modified the TDR value as per Allegorithmic's notes, now it no longer crashes, but freezes for the above mentioned time.
I've turned off Threaded Optimization for my graphics driver.

The projects I've tried working on have 2k maps, no opacity or anything. The issues began with a project with 2 texture sets, each with only a few textures added.
Oddly, some projects work just fine. I honestly can't figure out why some projects run smoothly and why others don't.
NVidia GTX770M, 16GB ram

Finnn

Although there can be mistakes in your graph that cause perfomance issues:
For example when you use a blend node with only one input, it can cause problems in the calculation. (quoting some Allegorithmic Video, never experienced that myself)

It's most probably a driver issue:
Uninstall all NVidia Products manually

Search for obsolete Registry Keys (with CCleaner for example) and delete them
Restart PC

Download latest Nvidia Drivers for your GPU
Start installer and choose manually only what you need to install
Restart PC

Also reinstalling the software could fix it, but first try the GPU drivers

Ashervisalis

Oh yeah, I did a full uninstall of the NVidia drivers. I'll try reinstalling SP and see if that works, although I'm not sure why it would have just started acting up so suddenly.

Finnn

Ashervisalis said:

Oh yeah, I did a full uninstall of the NVidia drivers. I'll try reinstalling SP and see if that works, although I'm not sure why it would have just started acting up so suddenly.

And did reinstalling fix it?

I had another idea which could cause behaviour like this
Maybe your PC assigned the OnBoard Chip to process Substance Painter.
I had this problem once and I had the same issues you are describing.
I was able to fix it by assigning my gpu as the default processor for graphical programs in the Nvidia Control Panel.

Ashervisalis

No it didn't, but it's really odd, any new projects I've started with SP don't have the same issue. It seems like it's a very select few simple projects which give me this issue. I'll check out my control panel today and see what my default processor is.

Finnn

Having a 100% usage of your gpu is generally not a bad thing though. If your SP isnt very slow and you can still work with it, everything is fine.

Neox

Substance just eats GPU for breakfast, the bottleneck here is likely your 770, even the 970 struggles with it. the 1070 was the first card that gave me somewhat of a smooth experience. But yeah on complex stuff my current card the 1070 feels like using it via a remote desktop control...

can you show how your texture is set up?

Ashervisalis

Oh man it's been ages since I've opened this project. The project still takes ages to open and has the same issues. I feel like I should have just exported my maps and started a new project just to see if it worked smoothly.

@Neox It's really simple, really not sure why it's giving me this issue. I've even got opacity turned off;