Dramatic Performance Drop with Surface Pro (GTX965M)

I have been getting around 20 fps on a blank project for the past month. Usually when I restart my laptop, Touch will give 60 fps on a blank sketch but a minute later and it will drop to 20. This happens automatically even with no nodes in the project. The performance monitor will list up around 60 to 90 ms for rendering a window. Task manager lists my nvidia gpu usage as 100% with nothing happening in Touch. I have tried reinstalling the latest experimental and stable touchdesigner build, windows, older and newer nvidia drivers but nothing seems to work. I’m also running the highest performance plan on my laptop. However, when I run touch with intel integrated graphics I get steady frames. I wondering if anyone else has experienced a similar problem and hopefully has a solution.

Can you check the system temperature? I believe the Surface Pro’s throttle due to power/heat issues.

Yes, look at the Tasks Manager’s CPU performance page and note if the CPU speed is getting throttled down. A common issue I used to have with the Surface Pro 3. However it got much better last year after applying all the Windows Updates and staying up to date. It rarely throttles on my now when I have it plugged in. On battery power is a different story.

if you download throttlestop or intel xtu you can undervolt your chip which can reduce the power consumption and heat output - they’ll also tell you if you are throttling due to power, or temperature or other.

pointing a fan at the hotspot of your laptop can also help if thermal throttling

Hi, I’m new to TD and have been recently starting learning it but I’ve also been getting variable performance issue with my desktop setup.

It also gets huge speed decreases on the startup project going from 9fs to 20fps up and down. But sometimes it will start fine with 60fps. Not sure best way to troubleshoot. Obviously I’ve updated drivers etc but wondering whether removing the GTX card is the way forward.

I’m also getting a similar fps drop situation with another GLSL reatime shader animation software. So it must be the same reason. My PC is decent speed 4GHz XEON W3670 nvidia K4200 and a GTx970. I wonder if it’s because I have 2 graphics cards which are causing a conflict?
Although if I force nvidia k4200 for cuda and rendering in nvidia control panel it doesn’t seem to make a difference. Are there optimal settings for TD in Nvidia control panel?

Thanks :slight_smile:

Hello carnbot,
I wouldn’t recommend running different series cards together like that. If you remove one of the how is the performance? Make sure you have the correct driver for Quadro or Geforce, depending on which one is installed.

Hi Ben,

Thanks for the reply. I’ve been running the cards together pretty well so far using the Quadro drivers. But yes will update the geforce with another quadro eventually.

Well I haven’t removed the Geforce card yet but have found that, after doing some Googling, that disabling “fast boot” fixes this fps drop issue for some. So far this is working and I’m getting 60 fps each startup since then without having to reboot each time.

So fingers crossed that’s fixed it for me… :slight_smile: