Quad Head + 1?

[evie]

Hi,

I'm trying to put together a system to run Touch Designer on, but having trouble figuring out what hardware to use... Help!

I have a space with four projectors, each 1920*1200, Which i need to display Touch Designer and PowerPoint on. I also want to run a control monitor.

So far, solutions that have presented themselves are:
1)
Run one PC for powerpoint, probably with an ATI card in to make use of EyeFinity.
Run another PC for Touch Designer with a Quadro 4000 in, driving two matrox dual head to go DP edition splitters, which would then drive a pair of projectors each. I'd then need to have another graphics card in there to run the control monitor, but i'm not sure what to use as the Touch Designer wiki seems to suggest that having two graphics cards in the machine would be a bad thing. I'm not sure if i'd be ok with another Quadro, and if so whether it'd need to be another 4000 or if i could go for one of the lower spec ones just to drive the control monitor.

2)
Run one PC for powerpoint, probably wtih an ATI card in to make use of EyeFinity.
Run a set of 5 PCs, each with a decent Nvidia card of some description in, linked via 1gb/s ethernet and use each of them to run a screen's worth of touch designer (the 5th being the control station). I've had a couple of PCs running networked to test, and found synchronisation to be difficult so i'm nervous about this approach.

3)
Run one PC for both powerpoint and touch designer - quadro with dual head to gos and turn on desktop spanning (i believe that the quadros have it under nview 3.5). however, my understanding is that touch designer doesn't play well with desktop spanning under windows 7 so i'm not sure how well this will work.

In all cases i'm expecting to run windows 7 on decent I7s or xeons, probably with 8gb of ram and the appropriate graphics card.

If anyone has any thoughts on which would be the most appropriate solution, or a solution that's completely different, info would be greatfully received.

thanks
-Evie

[malcolm]

Hey,
For 1, to make use of multiple graphics cards you either need to be using SLI Mosaic or GPU affinity. SLI mosaic doesn't seem useful for this setup. You can use GPU affinity on Windows XP right now, with 1 GPU running your control panel and 1 GPU outputting 4 outputs using DualHead2Gos. GPU affinity is supposed to start working on Windows 7 at some point, the bug database says in driver version 275.09, but I haven't tested that yet.

For 2. I would run 1 PC as your control system, and 1 PC with 4 outputs using DualHead2Gos. That way you have no sync issues. No need for 5 systems.

3. Where did you read about desktop spanning not working with with Touch in Windows 7? We've only used Dualview since Windows 7 didn't initially support spanning, but I don't see why spanning wouldn't work. If you plan to have powerpoint running at the same time then I you could put a DualHead2Go on one output and a TripleHead2Go on the 2nd output. You'll have 5 monitors and you can use 1 for your control panel and 4 for the outputs. All the monitors should be running the same resolution and you should just use a single large window that spans all 5 monitors. Having 2 windows open will cause framerate issues.

My choice would be option #2 with only 2 machines.

[evie]

Hi,

thanks for your reply.

I wasn't sure if one graphics card would have sufficient processing power to render video etc for four wuxga screens - hence using the four seperate PCs.

Currently i've got the trial download installed on a couple of laptops to check things out - both i7s with 4gb ram, linked by a crossover cable @ 1gb. One's a Geforce 260M, the other a 330M - not amazing cards i know, but not _that_ old either. I've tried sending Big Buck Bunny from one to the other using:

laptop 1: movie in top -> resolution top -> touch out top.
laptop 2: touch in top -> out top

and whenever i set the resolution higher than 800*600 the output gets really jerky. When i was running to an older receiving PC even 800*600 didn't work so great.

As such, i'm slightly concerned about trying to send a possible four movies, each at higher resolution than the Big Buck Bunny to one computer.

I guess i'm doing something really wrong somewhere along the lines, but no idea what it is I figured it was probably better to send timecode info and then play videos locally, but i've not got that far yet and wasn't sure how well it'd work when a video crosses from one screen to the next.

I'm also trying to work out how to make audio out chops talk to a 32 channel audio card, but that's another story...

[evie]

oh, forgot to mention:

I read about desktop spanning not working under windows 7 for touch here:

http://www.derivative.ca/wiki/index.php ... e_Monitors

"Touch can send video out to multiple projectors, monitors and recorders. TouchDesigner can run single-monitor or across many monitors (Horizontal Span only when on XP, Dualview on Windows Vista and 7). "

-Evie

[malcolm]

Ya you'd want to play the Movies locally. If you are playing content with a lot of motion then you'll need to make sure you have enough CPU cores to decode all the video streams.
Don't get hung up with the terms 'dualview' or 'desktop spanning'. They are just the modes you set the drivers setting in, but you use them the exact same in Touch.
No matter what you use Windows still just has one big desktop.

You don't send video to individual monitors, but instead have a single window that covers all 4 monitors, so that way things can move freely around.

[evie]

Hi,

Again - thanks for the info, that's really useful. Guess it's time to find some tutorials on time syncing multiple touch designer instances

The dual view and spanning stuff is a hangover from PowerPoint, which we were considering running on the same machine. That plan's gone out of the window now though - right tool for the job, etc.

thanks
-evie

[Achim]

hey evie,

unfortunately there are no tutorials for that, but to sync multiple instances on a single machine you would use the shared memory OPs.