TopToChop performance on various hardware

Hi TD folks.

I’m working on an installation where I’ll be driving an array of LEDs via DMX (ArtNet). It relies on a TopToChop node which is turning out to be a performance bottleneck, particularly downloading texture data from the GPU. I’ve tried the ‘next frame’ setting but it doesn’t seem to make much difference, at least in my situation.

I read elsewhere on the forum that this can vary considerably between graphics cards, like maybe the Quadro is faster than the Geforce. Right now I’m running on a mac mini with an Intel Iris graphics chip. I’m wondering if anyone knows how this compares to other cards for this particular feature. Would getting a windows box with a Quadro likely solve the problem? What about the Mac Pro with AMD FirePro card?

I attached a simple example of how I’m using the TopToChop. On my mac, according to the performance monitor, it averages about 6 ms to download texture data for a 32x277 image.

Thanks!

–Rob
TopToChopTest.toe (4.56 KB)

I’ll see what kind of stats I can wrangle from machines I work with:

TouchDesigner 099
Build 2017.3580

Download Type:
Next Frame

Win 10
Intel i7 5930 3.5 GHz
GTX 980

cooktime is right about 1 - 3ms

One consideration you might make for a project like this is to essentially build out two projects - do all of the control, visuals and composition in 1 then pass the texture over to another instance whose only job is to covert the image to channel data then send that information out via ArtNet. That’s a little more work to set-up, but divides up some of the labor.

Got it. I’ll try separating out the projects first. It sounds likely that better hardware would also improve this situation. Thanks, Matthew! And thanks for all the great tutorials online!

–Rob

TouchDesigner 099
Build 2017.3580

Download Type:
Next Frame

Win 10
Intel i7 7700 2.8 GHz
GTX 1060

cooktime is right about 1 - 2 ms

TouchDesigner 088
Windows 7

Intel Xeon E5-2630 2.4GHz

Quadro M4000

Download Type:
Next Frame
cook time is 0.9 ms

Thanks again for all the benchmarks. That is very helpful!

I tried splitting things up into multiple projects and that seems to be doing the trick so far. I’m launching the 2nd project with a tscript ‘viewfile’ command as recommended elsewhere on the forum (since it’s on a Mac). Now I think I’m hitting the vsync threshold (goal is around 67 fps). If anyone knows the best way to disable that on the Mac for TD, let me know (currently poking around trying to figure it out).

–Rob