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Optimization is a key part of making sure your TouchDesigner networks run smoothly and efficiently. We often talk about project performance by discussing our processing budget or the amount of time we have before our screen refreshes. For a project running at 60 fps, we have a total of 16.667 ms to use for a single frame. When you middle mouse click on an operator you can see the CPU time (in milliseconds) that the node is using. While we could go through a project one node at a time, it’d be difficult to tally up everything that’s running.
One of the best ways we can check our project’s performance is by using the Performance Monitor which gives you the CPU time that is consumed by each operator that cooks in one single frame. The Performance Monitor dialog (Dialogs -> Performance Monitor) allows you to monitor and diagnose which operators consume the most CPU processing time and what order operations are done, so you can optimize your networks.
You can also use Probe (found in the Palette) for a visual performance monitor of the CPU and GPU time and memory.