GFX cards and tearing

hi,
Ive been playing around with touch for a little while now, and will build up a machine to do some actual work.

I experience tearing issues on my current setup (MBP w/330M) connected to an old Dell 17" 1280x768 monitor (go easy on me, its just what I have laying around!) Its easy to ignore for testing, but I want to be sure to avoid this issue in the future, so from what I can tell these are my options:

  1. always run identical monitors and identical resolutions from a single card (not always possible - e.g. control monitor + performance projector would likely be different)
  2. get a quadro card and turn off Aero

are these the only options? and the cost of quadros are pretty high, are there any other significant reasons to get one of these cards vs a snazzy 6xx card, which seem even faster on paper…any advice is appreciated…
-matthew

Hey there,

I’m running the same setup and thinking about a few of the same questions.

  1. Try to setup a UI and work in performance mode, then your machine doesn’t have to render everything in the project (this gives me a pretty considerable performance boost)

  2. From what I’ve read here, the Quadro cards all come from one company, so they can be a bit more reliable, but something to keep in mind we’re in-between upgrade cycles right now on the two lines (Geforce & Quadro). The Geforce GTX680m is about to released with the new Kepler architecture, while the Quadro line is still using the Fermi architecture and won’t be upgraded till early next year. On paper this means that the soon to be released (like it should start rolling out now) Kepler based 680m has more power than the current Fermi based Quadro 5000m (don’t quote me 100%, but that’s what I’ve read in benchmarks).

With that in mind I guess it depends on when you plan on upgrading your machine. I know I’ll be upgrading shortly, so I will most likely grab a machine with a 680m in it (probably a Sager). If you were ok waiting till Spring 2013, then you’d be able to see benchmarks on the Kepler based Quadro cards. Just something to keep in mind.

In regards to aero:

The link below is an extremely helpful link for setting up your computer for audio production, but a lot of it is applicable for Touch, as its just ways to get the most out of your machine (big thanks to PreSonus for this!)

presonus.com/community/learn … for-vista/

The link says Vista, but everything is applicable to Windows 7.

Yes, you need to make sure you have identical monitors if you don’t want tears anywhere. If you need to have different monitors connected then make sure your tear-free content is on the Primary monitor (although I’m not sure Nvidia guarantees this will be tear free).
When using multiple monitors be sure to use Mosiac mode.
You can get tear free if you have Aero ON, but you will drop frames. With Aero off you won’t drop frames needlessly, but you may tear. Whether or not you tear can depend on how your window is opened, if anything is in front of the window (such as any part taskbar) and if your file is running at 60hz.

Buying a Quadro and using the Video Editing preset reduces the unknowns, since you can drop frames, use any window config etc and will stay tear free.

Malcolm, is there better configuration settings with the Quadro card drivers? Or are they about the same as the Geforce? I always assumed the main difference was hardware based.

Hi Malcolm,

So regarding the last sentence, if I have Quadros in Mosiac mode, I’m using the video preset and Aero is off I won’t get tearing but I will get dropped frames ? I am looking to find the best set up for playing back video glitch and tear free on multiple monitors.

Thanks,
Jeff

Elburz: The Quadro cards have more options and information in the Driver Setting dialog. In particular the Video Editing preset is only available on Quadros.

Jeff: You should get no tearing in that case. You may drop frames if your file is heavy, but they won’t be unaccounted drops the way you would get with Aero On (where TD would report running at a perfect 60fps but frames would still not make it to the monitor)

Malcolm: Thanks for the info!

Hi Malcolm,

OK, that makes sense . . . from what I can tell the GeForce cards will never actually deliver glitch free video playback. Even with just one movie playing, nothing else happening in the scene, I will get random frame drops with Aero running. Off to Quadro land for me . . .

Thanks,
Jeff

From what I’m learning it probably is possible to get glitch free display with a Geforce, but I’m unable to get actual guidelines on how to do this.
The best I can discover so far is that you need to:

  1. Turn aero off (which introduces tearing but avoids unaccounted frame drops)
  2. make your single window fullscreen and borderless
  3. make sure your window not covered by any other windows or the taskbar
  4. make sure you are running at the Hz of the connected monitor (if the monitor is running at 60hz, your file needs to be outputting 60hz without dropping frames, otherwise expect tears when you drop frames).
  5. I don’t think mosiac is supported on Geforces which means you need to only use 1 output from the card.

This isn’t 100% guaranteed to work though, just thoughts for now.

Hmmm, well I need 3-6 monitors/projectors, so sounds like still GeForce’s won’t work. I’ve actually gotten surprisingly good results with 3 GeForce cards and up to 6 displays . . . most shorter videos are OK, most scenes are OK, but just when viewed super critical on larger jobs they don’t hold up.

Apologies in advance if this comes off as rude, demanding or rantish. I’m on the tail end of almost two weeks of reading the wiki and forum looking for the best way to get off the ground with TD at a hardware level that don’t involve the outlay for quadros.
Surely there’s opengl based programs that run on windows without these really specific, expensive requirements. Does Derivative have any experience with any AMD cards that don’t tear? Firepro? There’s almost no recent information on here about AMD card performance. It seems weird that it’s a windows aero issue that a card driver can circumvent. I noticed the announcements today for the nvidia maximus workstation lines that support up to four displays. The new firepro’s were also announced with eyefinity 6. But these are all pipedreams for somebody learning touch.
The GPU requirements for TD are specific, expensive and poorly documented in many different places. Investing in multi-quadro’s just to see acceptable performance seems like a great way to exclude a massive part of the market.
Why is touch designer bound to a checkbox on the most expensive workstation cards with only two outputs? Is this likely to change? As somebody who is yet to buy a commercial license I want to dive head first into this environment and start developing but I just can’t get anywhere other than “spend 3 thousand dollars on graphics cards, then use your “forum support” to nut out any issues”

Yeah, it is frustrating, read this for my summary on why, viewtopic.php?f=7&t=3679.

Best advice I can give you to get started is to buy a GTX 670 card and see how that works for you. They are cheap, really fast, support 4 outputs, light, low power draw, really amazing cards. The results you get and the level of acceptable quality are really dependent on the content, final output and type of work you are doing. Try Aero on and off, try vsync on and off, each combination will give better or worse results depending on what kind of work you are displaying.

Jeff,

Did you end up getting those Quadros in? My 680m is still in the mail, and I’m getting itchy!

@bLackburst:

I think Geforce cards offer plenty of acceptable performance for many applications. I’ve had great performance (relatively) on my old Geforce 330m and I’m upgrading soon to what will be a much more powerful card, so I think it comes down to your specific needs, and at that point, I don’t think it’s crazy to require professional solutions like Quadro cards.

I don’t think it’s very unreasonable to list Quadros as recommended requirements as I think most people using TouchDesigner are doing so in very demanding situations where powerful cards would be required all the same. I’d like to assume that my audio mastering engineers are using the very high-end mastering quality converters regardless of whether their software requires it or not, know what I mean?

A few things to keep in mind, the TouchDesigner team isn’t all that huge, so I personally would rather see focus on continued development of the software (than documentation), but I very much sympathize about the wiki being a bit hard to follow at times, but trust me, things fall into place quickly (especially with the new videos up from the Mutek Workshops).

The team size is also why commercial license’s only provides forum support (which isn’t all that bad as staff do cycle around frequently).

It’s reasonable to expect GPU performance scalable to the GL content in your scene. I would completely expect to lose frames as the project became more and more complex, and for that reason it would be reasonable to recommend a workstation card. But it’s recommended as the solution to tearing, which is not performance per se, but a display problem. It happens at light to zero load because it’s a timing issue, and I question that workstation cards are the only way around that, having had experience with other packages.
If the 670 doesn’t tear I’ll buy one, and get the best framerate I can. It’s just a bit crazy that it’s a guessing game where you roll the dice on components.

@ Blackburst - The 670 will not tear if you are running in Aero with vsync on. The short summary is you don’t need a quadro to avoid tearing but you do need one if you want to have 100% glitch free playback, especially on multiple outputs. See this discussion for details viewtopic.php?f=7&t=3679.

@ elburz - Yes, got them (6000 cards) and have started to test. So far they are quite a bit slower in raw render speed than the GeForce. I have tested with Aero off and do not get tearing and do not have render glitches, which is great. But 1/2 frame rate vs GTX 670 is disappointing. But, that isn’t the whole story, as the overall final output looks a bit smoother. This may be due to more consistent rendering, this may be due to Aero not actually reporting an accurate frame rate. The lower frame rate is running with 2 cards and not having Mosiac working correctly . . . most of the slow render time is due to “waiting for vsync”, which may be a multi card set up issue. The other recommended optimization I have yet to try is GPU affinity, which according to what I’ve heard is the only way to get the best performance out of more than 1 Quadro card in the same system. It appears that optimizing scenes with multiple quadros is a new set of issues I haven’t seen in GeForce’s, so more later as I test.

Hey BLackburst,

I understand your frustration, its seems absolutely nuts that Nvidia can’t guarentee tear-free, frame-drop-free, performance from their Geforce cards in a simple scenario as you’ve outlined. However, as some other posters have pointed out, the Geforce cards can get you very far, have excellent power, and in some situations with certain displays and settings can produce completely perfect results. However, the caveat… it is not guaranteed on Geforce hardware, straight from Nvidia’s mouth. This is a hardware and hardware driver matter, and here at Derivative we do not want to misinform our users about what the Geforce cards are capable of.

Its get much more complicated and the results are more varied when you are talking about multiple displays and multiple GPUs. Nvidia’s answer for the customer who needs complete frame perfect performance is to move to their “professional line” of Quadro cards. This is why features such as SLI Mosaic for multiple output spanning and G-Sync for multiple GPU framesync are also only available on the Quadro line. They are not shy about this fact either, check out this Geforce link and at the bottom they clearly have a “Professionals” paragraph that links directly to their Quadro features.

Our recommendation is that you decide what your requirements are based on the project. In many venues, certain budgets, certain clients, a frame drop is tolerable (90% of people probably never notice frame drops, while 90% of the people on this forum will scream when they see it :laughing: ). In the case where frame drops are a show stopper, you are hopefully dealing with a client that is budgeting for those extremely high production values, and thus budgeting for Quadros is the price of admission to guarantee that level of performance.

We often recommend Quadros since many of our users are going big with multi-display, multi-GPU solutions, and in those cases the overpriced Quadros come through. We’ve spent many years working on Nvidia GPUs to get perfect playback, and the complexity does go through the roof when you are trying to eliminate that last frame drop in your 1 hour long show. We are also aware it can be hard to find all the relevant information in a quick, digestible format; we’ll continue working on improving that information to make it easier to find and understand. When you are having trouble finding something in the wiki, please just post here and we’ll try to point you in the right direction and make that topic easier to find for the next person.

To answer your AMD question;
AMD we only recently started to officially support. For years their openGL driver implementation was behind, but it is getting much better now so we’ve spent the time to get AMD up and running. Since this is a newer development, we actually do not have much field time with AMD cards, and their different product lines, so we don’t have much to report in the way of benchmarks and/or tearing and frame dropping. Also, there are a couple of features in TouchDesigner that are still Nvidia only such as CUDA, H.264 realtime encoding, and the Blob Track TOP. We still recommend Nvidia first due to these facts.

If you are just starting with TouchDesigner, I’d recommend getting a Geforce card first. They have great performance per dollar, and you can go top-of-the-line Geforce for a fraction of the price of a Quadro. Once you start learning the ins and outs of TouchDesigner, Quadros will be there if you need them and you won’t have spent any unnecessary money if you don’t.

Cheers

@bLackburst, I hear you. My Geforce 680m should be here in a week or two if you’d like I can run some tests for you.