Win7 or Win10?

Hey Guys,
Doing a new build - I’ve been out of the loop for a while - does TD run perfectly fine on Win10? Any better on Windows7? Any bugs I should know about.

Pretty much I’ve been a fan of Windows 7 but if most bugs have been worked out with Windows 10 then I might make the jump.

Win10 is good with TouchDesigner and generally preferred

(for high-performance work, Win-7 may still be better)

I was just benchmarking performance between 7 and 10 on the Intel NUC6i5 (6th gen 6260U, 32GB RAM) and found that my scene would run 60fps on win7 but only around 35fps on win10. In performance monitor the main difference seemed to be “rendering a window” was just a lot longer in win10.

The scene was a simple projection mapping setup for an installation: 15min looping 5760x1080 mpeg 4 (HAPs were too big given duration and number of files expected in final project), cropped to 3x1080p rectangles, with some simple stoner remaps and soft-edge masking.

Any ideas why win7 is working faster? I originally tried win7 because I had read that some Aero features can’t be disabled after win7, and sometimes cause sync/tearing problems. Is this still a relevant consideration for multiscreen setups or was that just a win8 thing?

There are still problems with Aero and Windows 10. It’s hard to get straight information on the subject, and tests are difficult too because it doesn’t always show performance issues. As best as I’ve seen and heard so far from tests and talking to Nvidia, for Windows 10 to behave well the perform window needs to be borderless and covering the entire desktop, as as it must have focus. This allows the Nvidia driver to take full control of the output and ensure tearfree/stutter free output. Without that then Aero is in charge of outputting frames and can decide to not display them.

What about for systems with only Intel on-board graphics?
I finally got to test my installation onsite today and was experiencing some tearing, despite using win7 with all Aero features I could find disabled, TD fullscreen across all projectors, without borders… made me very sad :frowning:

I tried setting my project to 30fps and Perform COMP v-sync set to FPS is half monitor rate. Intel graphics set to output 60p… not sure what to try next… might just have to live with digital glitches in an otherwise-serene underwater scene? I wish this project had a budget for computers with dedicated NVIDIA GPUs…

We use Win10 for our office computers since it’s easier to get a bit more pleasant to use but still require all our install boxes be Win7. Still very few reasons we need Win10 for install boxes. Kinect 2 we can just use a NUC or similar small form factor PC to get the data and send it over the network, and everything else still works fine on Win7.

For the Intel HD, you may or may not have much options, unfortuntely. The best bet is to go through all of the available driver settings and making sure there’s no power saving features on, as well by default the Intel HD driver has a ton of post processing turned on, like dynamic colors, some de-noisers, etc. Turn all those off and see if it helps.

If not you may want to try something like a Matrox Dual Head (pretty cheap boxes) to take a single display feed from the computer and split it into multiple feeds for the displays.

I guess I’m taking this a bit off topic with my specific problems, but thanks for the advice. We went with a similar triple head product (for budget and native mDP to HDMI) but I didn’t realize that the three HDMI outputs would enumerate as separate displays. I’d never heard of displayport’s multi-stream functionality, but I am guessing it is not helping the situation. Was expecting display to enumerate as single 5760x1080 frame… amazon.com/StarTech-com-Dis … 015J8QWR2/

Aside from my tearing issues, does anyone have an idea why my Win10 benchmark FPS was so much lower than on Win7? I’m pretty sure I had Intel HD driver in high performance mode for both OS tests. (It was a hectic day of repetitive OS installing though so maybe I just screwed it up…)

Now onsite I was also finding that the win7 taskbar wouldn’t always stay hidden by fullscreen Window COMP even when “always on top” was enabled. Would that be improved by switching to win10? Not sure I can spare the computational headroom with the FPS drop I saw in my benchmarking… Feeling super n00bish right now… Thanks again for the advice!

CutMod, if you’re having focus issues, you can grab the mouse control comp we put on github and click on the screen repeatedly after launch…not graceful but it works when all else fails. Usually delaying the launch of your TouchDesigner program until a few minutes after Windows launches is good practice, that way it settles down and all the pop ups would have come and gone by then.

I don’t know about the displayport triplehead, but the dualheads I’ve used have always done single monitor emulation. I remember something about the older tripleheads not supporting a triple HD resolution, so maybe that’s why they went with the DP multi-stream.