Future Support for Windows ARM and NVIDIA RTX Spark?

Wishlist and RFEs
1

Hello Derivative Team,

I have a question regarding the future of TouchDesigner on Windows ARM platforms.

With NVIDIA recently announcing the RTX Spark platform, there is growing interest in high-performance ARM-based Windows devices that offer powerful GPU and AI capabilities, unified memory architectures, and CUDA support.

Currently, I understand that TouchDesigner does not officially support Windows on ARM. However, I am curious whether ARM support is being considered for the future, especially as platforms such as RTX Spark become more common.

For users working with TouchDesigner in areas such as real-time graphics, AI integration, and interactive installations, ARM-based systems could become very attractive if native support were available.

Are there any plans, investigations, or long-term considerations regarding:

  • Native Windows ARM support for TouchDesigner

  • Compatibility with NVIDIA RTX Spark devices

  • Support for CUDA and GPU acceleration on future ARM-based Windows systems

I understand that this may not be on the current roadmap, but I would appreciate any insight into how the team views ARM platforms in the longer term.

Thank you for your time and for the continued development of TouchDesigner.

Best regards,

2

Hey,

Thanks for the question. Yes, if the Windows ARM hardware grows in market share then we’ll add support. It’s a very similar process to when we added support for ARM on macOS.

For now though I think you should be able to run TouchDesigner via the emulation those devices have.

3

I am not sure if we are able to run it emulated as the installer fails form the starts. Do you have any suggestions on how to go about it?

4

Hi @emirshn

the installer (especially if you download the full installer) mainly copies files to the application folder. The command line option /Extract will extract all relevant files from the installation into a folder. In combination with /DIR the target folder can be specified. This can be useful if the installation process is failing for some unknown reasons. In the extracted folder structure, the TouchDesigner.exe executable can be found in the bin folder.

Hope this helps
Markus

5

We do have an ARM marchine in-house now and are looking at how to improve the installer in the future to allow ARM builds. There does seem to be an issue with one library (mimalloc.dll) that doesn’t work correctly in the emulation mode. So we’re considering how to fix that.