CPU choice

Hi,

Looking on the Wiki, TD obviously prefers Nvidea cards - is there a preference between Intel and AMD for CPU? I cannot see a reference for that?

thanks,

Juddy

For CPUs, higher clock speeds and IPS (instructions per cycle) are more important than number of cores or multi-core performance. So in that metric, you will find more Intel models with slightly higher CPU clock speeds and Intel is known for its higher fps. But this difference is often small for CPUs around the same clock speed, it does not affect performance as much as the GPU does. And you can get really good deals on AMD CPUs that would let you spend more money on your GPU/SSD where it really counts with TD.

The best resource is to look up gaming specs for CPUs you are interested in and compare, TouchDesigner will have similar deltas to CPUs that game benchmarks/tests do.

Great- thanks Ben

Once the the project is loaded, does the drive speed matter as much; I assumed the project would be in system RAM?

Hap Playback.

If your project has any amount of large disk access during runtime you’ll want fast disk access. Your best money/mileage these days would come from nvme and other pci based storage.

I don’t have precise metrics, but my desktop workstation has a pair of Samsung 850 Pro SSDs in a raid 0 configuration but, it has slightly lower disk access performance for Hap playback than the nvme pci storage on my 2019 Razer Blade.

Fast disk access will help you buffer Hap’s large files to the GPU faster, resulting in smoother playback with less memory bottlenecks. If your project does recording to hap during runtime, you’ll also see large benefits there.

Movie streaming and asset loading still requires lots of fast disk access, TouchDesigner does not load the entire movies into RAM, only the ‘read-ahead’ number of frames.