Has anyone tried the new Quadro M4000 cards with TouchDesigner? We’ve got quite a few projects with more than 3 outputs, with a GUI included that obviously makes 4, standard on all Nvidia cards. We’ve played around with AMD Firepro W9100 cards (in our D3 server) but then after 5 outputs we’d need multiple cards. I’m thinking that Nvidia will give us better scalability.
My thought is that we’d run the cards with either multiple touch instances locked to a GPU or set up an SLI mosaic. What are peoples thoughts on the best way to run multiple outputs from one machine. It gets much trickier on site, especially installs, to run multiple servers, with the added syncing issues, extra costs for Pro licenses etc.
Those 2 ways are the standard. Either using GPU affinity to lock instances to graphics cards or using Premium Mosaic to create a single logical desktop that spans all the cards.
Affinity allows you to use each card to its max potential in terms of power and memory. But then you have to keep your instances synced (or maybe you dont need to).
Mosaic allows you to create a gigantic canvas as easily as possible, but all your cards have to be the exact same cards, and all your outputs have to be the same, and you have the processing of one card, with all the available outputs of all the cards, if that makes sense.
Just spec’d a job with 3 M4000’s in SLI, plus sync card for 8 outputs plus GUI screen.
Is it possible to run 2xM4000’s in Mosaic SLI then have a seperate lower end Quadro with GPU affinity to run the control from? Would save a bit on costs.
Cheers for the feed back. It seems like a good solution.
I’m learning quite a lot about what we can and can’t do at 4k. Next question, if I wanted to run 2HD screens plus a 4K projector with v-Sync, my thoughts would be, two Quadros, 4K projector into one, Monitor and two HD projectors into the other. Two touch instances, GPU affinity and sync between them with a Touch Designer Pro license.
Does that make sense to you? Currently we obviously can’t run the 4k projector in 4k resolution with the HD projectors in the same GTX card.
The only issue with that is mixing the projectors and the monitor on the same card can cause issues because even if they are the same resolution they will likely be slightly different refresh rates. 59.97hz vs. 60hz for example. This can cause issues since the GPU can only sync to one of the refresh rates.
So if you are looking for perfection you’ll want to keep your control monitor separated, but if you are ok with an occasional stutter (single dropped frame) then this will work.