Ok i m experiencing a weird problem now...any other filter is quite fine but the surface blur is taking a really long time ...up to 20 minutes until i get a new preview no matter what i change.
I have CS6 and a HD Radeon 6790 anyone knows whats going on or what might cause the problem?

Depending on the amount of blur/radius used, Surface blur will be extremely slow, I don't think it's just you that has this problem!

My PC often takes 3-4 minutes for only a moderate amount of blur.

Go make yourself a coffee while you're waiting.

great...thats exactly the answer i didnt wanted to hear. Oh well its gonna be more than just one coffee with that many images

Seconds here using gtx 550 ti, (cuda helps). Also check your settings, edit, preferences, perfomance. Gpu and other settings, scracth disk etc...

just dont use blur, problem solved

You could create an new Action, batch process them and head off down the pub while your computer grinds through them.

Boost your preference to like 90%

How much Ram are you Using ...   and which version of CS6    32 or 64Bit 
if it is 32 Bit it sucks on memory and if you dont have 64bit system, then while working on Photoshop turn rest of application OFF,  even Browser , Chat software  etc...   and under preferences  allocate  60-70% available RAM to Photoshop.

Hope that Helps 


JFI ..  windows 32 Bit OS  only Support 3.89GB RAW    where as  64 Bit OS support around 192GB ...     and Ideal is to have Min 12GB RAM

hope that helps

I have found when you use surface blur in 16 bit mode, it takes forever literally. On my old computer, it took an hour. 8 bit mode is much quicker, a few minutes tops.

I haven't tried it on my new comp.

System Ram and CPU are the pertinent questions here
Video card specs are basically irrelevant

That's nothing. Just wait if you have a Nikon D800 RAW in 16 bits, and you have 10 full layers composite while all your available RAM is max out, running on VM.

make an 8 bit flat duplicate of the image you are working on and SurfBlur that

Try playing around with the cache levels and tile sizes.  Getting that set right, for your needs, can be very helpful.

None of the tips you've been given will help.

Surface Blur is an old filter with outdated code. As far as I know it is not multicore/multithread optimized and it is definitely not GPU optimized. Cuda/OpenGL/OpenCL... it just doesn't care.

Surface blur is slow, period, and more so on 16bit large images.

The workaround is to apply it to an 8bit duplicate document which you can later import as a layer.

This is part of Adobe's policy of bringing in new stuff (not always useful stuff) rather than fixing what hasn't worked properly since the version it was implemented.