FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What kind of graphics card do I need for TouchDesigner?

A: TouchDesigner runs on NVIDIA Geforce and Quadro graphics cards. It is recommended to use a Geforce 7800 or better card. ATI/AMD should also function now with the latest drivers.. See TouchDesigner System Requirements for details.

Q: Does TouchDesigner support vertex and pixel shaders?

A: Yes. Geometry shaders are also supported on NVIDIA 8-series and better cards.

Q: Which MIDI controllers can I use with TouchDesigner?

A: TouchDesigner can use any MIDI device as an input. TouchDesigner`s advanced MIDI mapper dialog allows TouchDesigner to "learn" many different MIDI devices. You can then save your MIDI preferences to file and reload the different devices at any time.

Q: What is the most ideal system I should buy for TouchDesigner?

A: TouchDesigner runs on laptops, desktops, and rackmounts. You don't need to buy the fastest CPU, but get the best NVIDIA graphics card with the most graphics RAM you can afford. TouchDesigner can use a lot of CPU RAM, so get as much as possible. The input devices you choose, like Oxygen8, Behringer BCF2000, or MotorMix, depends on what you want to do with TouchDesigner. For more details on preparing a TouchDesigner system, read this post.

Q: Does TouchDesigner benefit from having multi-core CPUs in the system.

A: Yes, there are quite a few parts of TouchDesigner that will use threading to off-load work onto extra CPUs. The biggest one is movie/audio reading and decoding, which is always done in separate threads. If you are playing high resolution movies you'll benefit greatly from having extra CPUs to do the decoding. Other things that benefit from multi-core CPUs are network communication and converting SOP data into a format that the GPU can understand.

Q: Can I use live audio to drive TouchDesigner visuals?

A: Yes.

Q: Can TouchDesigner output to multiple screens?

A: Running your computer with two monitors allows two images to go to two screens. Often the left monitor is a control panel and the right monitor is a full-screen video output, at any resolution your hardware allows. We recommend setting up the multiple displays in Horizontal Span mode for Windows XP, and Dual-View for Windows 7, set in the NVIDIA control panel.

The right monitor can be a wide view sent to 2 or more video scan converters, or Matrox Dualhead2Go/TripleHead2Go splitters, each going to a different display or projector. This can also be used for left/right eye displays. One TouchDesigner file can run on several computers at the same time, each with a different camera view, synced through TouchDesigner TCP/IP pipes, but exact frame syncronization is not possible.

Q: Where can I find documentation for TouchDesigner?

A: All documentation can be found in this wiki.

Q: Will TouchDesigner be available for Mac OSX?

A: We do not currently have a schedule for porting TouchDesigner to Mac OSX, but are interested in doing so. If you would like to see TouchDesigner released for OSX, please let us know in our forum.