Is my Macbook not cutting it?

Beginners
1

Hi all! New TD user here, really enjoying the software. One problem I’m facing is a steep drop in FPS when I add >5 or so operators (I’ve been trying to learn TD by implementing tutorials I find on the internet). The FPS will go from 60 down to like 8-10 which is pretty hard to use.

Is there something I can be doing to maintain 60 FPS as I make more involved pieces? Or is the bottleneck my integrated graphics card?

Specs:
Mac OS: Catalina
Mac: Retina, Late 2013
Processor: 2.4 GHz i5
Memory: 8GB
Graphics: Intel Iris 1536 MB

Thanks for any input!

2

It should run faster than that, but it really depends ‘which’ nodes or components you are dropping down. There are some things in the palette that require a beefy GPU, like particlesGPU, which would make your spec of laptop slow down quite a bit.

Can you attach an example file of the file that is slow for you?

3

Thank you for responding, Ben! I apparently can’t upload directly here (new user) so I pushed it to Google Drive!

I got about 25% of the way through this tutorial before the slowdowns started happening: Noise Displacement in TouchDesigner — Simon Alexander-Adams

4

Yeah, the problem is your have a Grid SOP with 800x800 = 640,000 points, that is just way to much for your Intel GPU. Drop it down to 200x200 or so and see how you fair and continue the tutorial. If you have a Dedicated Nvidia or AMD GPU you ‘might’ be able to use that many points, but real-time is all about optimization and when pushing that many points around you are usually getting into GLSL Shader territory.

1 Like
5

Thank you, @ben, I’ll give that a shot! I found some resources on utilizing the performance monitor so I’ll look into those too. Thank again :slight_smile: