TouchDesigner runs on NVIDIA and AMD graphics hardware. See our System Requirements for more information.
Intel or integrated graphics chipsets are not supported in TouchDesigner.
Here is some more news for nvidia.
They are looking to purchase AGEIA, a physics based accelerator.
Now maybe we can get those particles to start flying like crazy in realtime?
New ATI cards look exciting
Easy access to large numbers of displays without buggering around wtih Matroxes, genlock cards, etc
Now if only ATI and Touch played nicer together. Or Nvidia copies 
Agreed, the new ATI cards are compelling on paper. Eyefinity looks great for multiscreen installations, hothardware.com/News/AMD-Eyefini … In-Action/ …
Also noticed that Catalyst drivers 9.9 support more opengl extensions than ever, including geometry shaders. Not parity with Nvidia, yet at least now in the ballpark extensions-wise. Malcom, does this make any difference, or is driver support more complex than just the extensions?
Anyone out there have newest AMD/ATI and give feedback on use with Touch?
Unfortunately, in my experience the amount of time between when an extension appears in a driver, and the when it is bug-free enough to use, can be quite a while.
Just updating this post with the current state of graphics cards for TouchDesigner.
Both Nvidia and AMD are now supported. For further details see TouchDesigner’s System Requirements.
I’ve updated to build 18580, running latest 12.8 drivers for AMD 6870 but am having the same problem of tearing without aero, dropping frames with aero.This is stated as being an Nvidia geforce problem in a few places in the forums which clearly it isn’t.
Can I ask which AMd cards have been tested by derivative to not suffer these problems and qualify as compatible? Obviouslyy there is not going to be a “video editing” checkbox on AMD cards, does simply being able to run touch qualify as compatible?
For the record other OpenGL applications don’t tear on my machine
Hey, can gou give examples of some apps that dont’t tear? Id love to compare them. From what Iv learnt from Nvidia this tearing is caused by the vastly different windowing system in Vista/Windows 7.
Look at Jitter for comparison, I haven’t got it installed anymore but never noticed tearing. I have also used (now antiquated) Visual Jockey on Win7 with no tearing. Resolume also. Admittedly other applications in mind are xp and osx based, but if what you are saying is indeed the case that would be across the board for all OpenGL applications in win 7 not run on a quadro ie. no opengl games that don’t tear? So what I perceived to be an nvidia fault from previous explanations is actually an Os issue, which is circumventable with a checkbox on quadro cards then? That is platform-changing information which hopefully is well documented with resolutions well underway from the card providers. Terrible if it is, but I’m not under the impression that all opengl programs under win7 suffer this. I know I’m starting to sound like a broken record with this problem but I really can’t go forward with touch if it keeps a quadro requirement for a clean output.
Sorry let me elaborate. I can assure you I’m just as frustrated as you. I spend countless hours every project trying to get tear-free outputs or other various features working correctly in conjunction with each other.
When I say it’s a Win7 problem I mean things changed with Win7 so we no longer get the easy tear-free output we are used to with Windows XP. Nvidia obviously has a solution, the Video Editing profile, but they have decided to only make it available on Quadros. So it’s a Win7 issue, that Nvidia refuses to fix on Geforces, likely because they feel the extra work involved with supporting the solution is worthy of Pro-level cards.
I have recently updated this article with hints for Geforces:
derivative.ca/wiki077/index. … al_Tearing
The key thing here that it is possible to get tear-free output on Geforces, but it’s trial and error, and even then it’s not guaranteed. I’m unable to get a step-by-step checklist to achieve this goal from Nvidia. Also any solution that works with one GPU/Driver/Monitor setup may not translate to a working solution with any of those variables changed.
But this continues to be very high on my list to find a good solutions for.
Here is a jitter test file in which you can go fullscreen with several different meshes and use the mouse to perpetually spin them. I don’t experience any tearing nor dropped frames running this in aero mode or basic mode fullscreen or windowed. In touch I can’t have a cube rotating without quite bad tearing. This tells me that my graphics drivers are coping with the win7 windowing system fine and that touch designer may be handling it differerntly?
3dmeshtest.rar (9.05 MB)
Hey Blackburst,
I am interested in continuing to investigate this. Is there any chance you could make a jitter file that has a vertical white bar on a black background, moving left->right->left endlessly?
Also is it possible to make the same file but this time make it dropping frames due to too much load? (i’ve never used jitter myself)
Nvidia has never told me ‘Other people don’t have this problem, you must be doing something wrong’. In fact it’s always the opposite, and I’ve always gotten the impression this is a problem that people endlessly run into since Windows 7 came around. But I’d love to be proven wrong here so hopefully this investigation will reveal something.
I’m always up for being a guinea pig, as well, in 077 and 088, if you wanted to upload a test .toe or .tox.
I actually no longer have jitter personally and just had a colleague package the mesh example into a stand alone, because it is practically identical to the touch file that I was using. I can ask around and see if somebody has some time to do so. It might be worth looking at processing projects as well, openprocessing is a good resource for this. Maybe even have a look at the resolume demo?
Does anyone have any experience with AMD Firepro W9000/W9100 cards?
Pushing 6 outputs from one card sounds kind of awesome!
Having 16 gigs of ram and costing a couple grand less than a Quadro also sounds kind of cool…
They’ve been tested here and used for some projects now. Seem to work well.
Are there any TD features (ie: GPU Affinity, CUDA, etc.) that wouldn’t be available if the host system is using an AMD board?
From my understanding, you wouldn’t have premium mosaic or affinity, although AMD I think has their own version of Mosaic…not sure about affinity, just repeating what I’ve heard elsewhere on the forum for you!
Yes, there are quite a few Nvidia only features such as GPU affinity, H264 encoding, CUDA.