Perform mode for 3 displays

Hi,

I would like to run Touchdesigner in perform mode to save resources for fluid playback. But I only have the non-commercial version. Is there a way to assign multiple window COMPs to the perform mode?

I couldn’t find anything about in Google. I would be grateful for help.

The window COMP has a display assignment par called location. You can use this to set the output destination of your window.

Thanks!
So can I have multiple windows open in perform mode?

You can open as many windows as you like, though you’re performance will suffer for it - I usually see a pretty significant performance drop doing this and it’s not recommended as a solution for high-performance installations or configurations.

You’ll have to set up some commands to script opening the window COMPs.

Ok.
Since I only have the non-commercial license I don’t have the option to expand one window on two screens. So my performance is really bad because of this.
I was hoping that my fps would go up if I would run the show in performance mode.
You said that you could open as many windows as you like in performance mode? As far as I can see it you have to choose one specific window COMP for the performance mode.

Sorry about the fast responses, I’ve been running to and fro here.

While it’s true that there’s only one dedicated “perform” window for your network, you can open additional window COMPs.

Take a look in this example:
openWindowsExample.toe (5.29 KB)

Here Project1 is set to open in perform mode, but the button in this container will open and close another window component. Using this approach you can open many window components while in perform mode. The downside here is performance, a network running multiple windows will almost always perform more poorly than a network running only 1.

It’s also worth noting that non-commercial licenses limit texture side, not Component size. You can still have a window that spans multiple displays, you’re just limited by the size of the texture you use as the background. You can see that in this example:
compSizeExample.toe (3.81 KB)

Did you misspel that? I really like your fast responses :smiley:

Ok, the possibility to open a window with a button is pretty cool!

I saw that yesterday too that I could scale windows infinitely.
Strangely my project runs slower when I open it in perform mode (20-30 fps, without perform mode 30-40 fps). I think I will try to run it in standard and have only one window across both screens. I hope that makes the performance a bit better.

Do you know a reason for the worse performance in perform mode? And do you have an idea what the bottleneck could be? Neither my cpu, ram, gpu or hdd were maxed out even though I got this almost choppy playback.

You might be getting worse performance in perform mode because it’s causing more node chains to cook.

When in network, depending on where you are and what node viewers are active and visible, things may not all cook the same.

You might be seeing the true expense of your network in perform mode and a not completely representative fps while in network mode.

Can take a snapshot of the performance monitor in and out of perform and compare to see what the difference is too.

Network optimization is hard. I usually encourage people to devote 15-20% of their project time to the optimization process.

Using the performance monitor dialogue is important for this process:
derivative.ca/wiki099/index … tor_Dialog

Like lucasm mentioned there are a number of things that might only show up in perform mode. One of the gotchas that’s tripped me up is how you use panel CHOPs or Panel Execute DATs. If you’re not careful about what you’re doing here it’s easy to end up forcing everything down stream to cook because you’ve interacted with the control panel for your UI. Filter or Lag CHOPs for smooth ui animation effects are a big culprit here. They make for smooth interaction, but do effectively force cook everything that’s dependent on them.

It’s very difficult to help folks optimize a network without seeing it - so I’d start by using the performance monitor to track down where you’re getting large cook times first. That might lead you to a more specific question that’s easier for the forum to help answer. :slight_smile:

Thanks for clarifying the perform mode. Though it doesn’t make sense to me that the performance is worse. Maybe I’m not far enough in to the program.

In the performance monitors the biggest things that slowed down my PC were the window COMPs. Strangely running 2 projectors either with two COMPs or one that was enlarged on the two screens did not make any difference.
In order to run 3 screens from my PC I enabled the mainbords graphics as well as the one from my gpu. We didn’t have any money left to buy an active display port to HDMI converter.
Because of the bad performance we are running the second screen (a webcam feed) now on a laptop controlled via Touch Ins from the main desktop PC. Thi seems to have solved the problem. We are getting a pretty stable 60fps across the board.

Thanks for your help anyways!

What GPU do you have. Running in Perform Mode might be slower because you are drawing to the entire set of screens and the GPU just has too much drawing to do now, though that would be rare these days unless it is a Intel GPU or low-powered GPU. As mentioned above, the best way on Windows is 1 Perform Window COMP if possible.

So I just put my PC specs in my signature.
Maybe it has to do with my old GPU. My motherboard was also set to choose the main graphics driver (had 2 running since I needed the outputs from my GPU and mainboard). Maybe it chose the intel one.