CPU usage on osx

Hi,
I am completely new to TD, Mac user… And looking forward to learn a bit more as it looks great!
I downloaded the 0.99 version of touchdesigner and installed it on my Macbook pro (retina early 2013).
When opening TouchDesigner with the example (Newproject.1) my activity monitor shows 85-90% of CPU usage even when I put the project on pause.

Can someone confirm this is normal behaviour, and if not, where I should be looking to check my computer’s configuration ?

The characteristics of the MBP:
2,7Ghz Intel Core I7
16Gb Memory
Graphics: Nvidia Geforce 650M 1024Mb + Intel HD 4000
Thanks,
Alain

My 2014 machine will drop to 50-60% when I paused the timeline. However, pausing the timeline doesn’t stop cooking. To turn off cooking, turn off the orange power button next to Tutorials on the top left bar. That should drop your activity close to nothing.

Hi,
I’m having same issue. I’m on a macbook pro 2017 with an Radeon Pro 560 4096 MB. After making a more elaborate patch running tons of CPU / GPU elements I noticed I was running up to 100% cpu tons of memory.

For my own sanity I closed everything, rebooted the computer, installed a version of the release corresponding to my OS 10.12 (keeping this OS for sake of other software I like to use), and then opened new session with the template nodes i.e. noise Chop to displace TOP. Running at close to 60% CPU.

10.12.5
MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2017)
2.9 GHz Intel Core i7
16 GB 2133 MHz LPDDR3
Radeon Pro 560 4096 MB

FYI double checked using [url]https://gfx.io/[/url] that I am in fact using Radeon with TD

Update to the above post:

I double checked on two other machines see below for details:

Machine Original

10.12.5
MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2017)
2.9 GHz Intel Core i7
16 GB 2133 MHz LPDDR3
Radeon Pro 560 4096 MB

CPU on initial startup example or blank 50% usage constant

Machine Alternative #1

OS 10.14.5
MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2018, Four Thunderbolt 3 Ports)
2.3 GHz Intel Core i5
16 GB 2133 MHz LPDDR3
Intel Iris Plus Graphics 655 1536 MB

CPU on initial startup example or blank 50% usage constant

Machine Alternative #2

Intel Core i7 2.11 GHz
16 GB Ram
Windows 10
NVidia GeForce 1050

CPU on initial startup example or blank 10% usage constant

Looks like it’s a mac v. pc platform issue not really about the hardware.

Hi Michael,
Thanks for the leg work, but I am pretty sure the different in numbers here is more about how Windows and macOS report them differently. Windows reports all processor together to get to 100%, where as macOS reports them separately. For example, when I startup TD on macOS it goes to 150% because it uses more than 1 processor, and if I use a CPU rendering program like Blender, it will report 400%. Windows reports a sum of 100% over all processors, you can see this in the task manager by switching the view “Change graph to: Logical Processors”. Notice that 1 CPU is being used by TD at almost 50% when doing that.

Furthermore, if you use a CPU monitoring application other than Activity Monitor (I use iStat Pro), you’ll see the 60% CPU usage reported by Activity monitor is closer to 15% total CPU usage when calculated like WIndows does it.

To summarize, TouchDesigner’s cooking engine is single threaded, and while it uses other CPUs for tasks like opening files, decoding moves, and monitoring inputs and devices, it will use a single CPU heavily. It is realtime like a game engine and it always running at 60fps, it doesn’t sleep like typical 3D rendering programs when there is nothing onscreen, so the numbers you are seeing are in line with our expectations at this time.

Of note, there was a recent jump in GPU usage of about 10-15% for those macOS users that are using Mojave. This is entirely due to change Apple made to macOS Mojave and the openGL drivers, and out of our control. We have tried a number of workarounds, and reporting it to Apple, but there is no way around it for Mojave unfortunately.

Here are some screengrabs of CPU utilization on Windows and macOS that helps visualize what I am referring to.

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