I just downloaded the free version of TouchDesigner to test out before purchasing and I wanted to create a sample project to see how it goes. I’m using the most latest version of TD for Apple silicon. My frames are super low, but I was suspicious because I have a pretty high end Mac Studio with a 24-core CPU and 60-core GPU. When monitoring my CPU/GPU usage, it’s not very high when playing a scene on TD, however, I still get low frames. I would imagine that it would start dropping frames when my CPU/GPU usage was maxing out.
My GPU usage is low and my GPU usage is normal as well and it’s weird because when I pause playing the video from TD I don’t see my CPU/GPU usage drop at all. I would imagine that it would spike while playing and go down after I pause, but I’m not seeing that. It’s strange because I’m working with not a lot of SOPs currently.
I’m hovering around 5 - 6 frames with realtime mode on or off doesn’t matter.
Am I doing something wrong?
The bars in the screenshot on the left is my GPU core usage and the bars on the right is my CPU cores usage.
If you go to Dialogs>Performance Monitor and hit Analyze on the bottom left corner of the performance monitor window you will be able to see what operations are taking too long, should help narrow it down.
This is what I see, however, I knew that the noise was the OP causing everything to slow down since when I bypass it I go from 5 frames to around 20, but I’m only working with 3 objects here I’m not sure why this beast of a computer wouldn’t be able to handle that. Looking at my GPU/CPU usage it doesn’t look like it’s my computer’s resources that are being maxed out.
it’s easy to create a network which can hog your machine, hard to say without seeing what you made. Perhaps you have a model with many points and and are trying to Noise SOP that? Try it with a default Sphere SOP as input.
Also your 24 cores won’t help as TD is single threaded for most nodes.
I can already see 2 noiseSOPs.
Do a middleMouseClick on the noiseSOP to see its cooktime. I suppose there are quite alot of points in there.
Another thing: Disable all the viewers of your nodes. I had some strange behaviour with SOPviewers creating framedrops until interacted with.
You’ll be able to add your file here after a short time in the forum when your ‘trust level’ goes up to level1. This should only take about 10-20 minutes of reading threads. (or you can share a link to the file using wetransfer/dropbox/google etc)
It definitely looks like you are trying to animate too many SOPs with high polygon counts. SOPs are calculated on the CPU and you want to animate them as little as possible, or have more simple geometry. TouchDesigner’s main process is single threaded, so more CPU cores will not help with SOPs.
For heavy geoemtry and manipulating more points, you’ll want to investigate GPU workflows. Once we see your file and understand what you are trying to do, perhaps we can suggest some routes to take to do it on the GPU.
