heyo,
so I’m familiar with affinity and its power, and when its needed.
I’m a bit in the fog when it comes to a system with many GPUS, in this case 5, where all of them are outputting on all outputs, they will be Quadro’s and will be synced via two Quadro sync cards.
im going to make as little mosaic configurations as i can but it has limitations so either way ill have more then a handful of “monitors”.
my question is, on the instance of touch designer that is running, i want to playback and output content, at which point what affinity would i use? does it even matter in a configuration like this? where sharing data from gpu to gpu is inevitable.. and is there a better workflow?
if you are using all your GPUs in a Mosaic setup, Video card affinity does not come into play.
Affinity only matters for running multiple instances of TouchDesigner on multiple videocards - say a project with a controller UI on one GPU and a playback project on another.
Hey, so mosaic is limted to 4*4 GPUs and has resolution limits, so I’ll probably have 4 or 5 mosaic screens.
I understand affinity is for multiple instances, I guess my title was misleading, the real question was, is there a difference of where I run the project if it’s outputing to many gpus? There’s no way of getting around having to share textures to multiple GPUs without running multiple instances and is the overhead/cost worth thinking about having multiple instances that are synced vs one that is outputing to many gpus?
Its a question of if you want to control what is happening, or let the driver try to figure out what is happening and hope it makes the best choices. Usually when you are using multiple GPUs without Mosaic or Affinity, then all of the work will be done on one GPU, and then the final results are transferred to the other GPUs to be displayed on the outputs. Whether that is more performant than having the content rendered on each GPU and avoid the transferred, will require testing. Usually the transferring can be quite expensive.