TextureMind Desktop

I finished the implementation of virtual monitors on NVIDIA GRID cards and it works. Now it’s possible to open one or more virtual monitors and set a resolution up to 4K. It worked fine on EC2 g6.xlarge with Windows Server 2025. In TMD, you don’t need a client with more than 1 monitor to handle multiple monitors on the server. You can change display layout from the viewer and connect into one or more monitors. Physical monitors are not deactivated so you don’t get black screen when the client connects to the physical machine. You can eventually deactivate your physical monitors and mount virtual monitors instead, to exclude physical monitors from rendering. In TMD, you can have different graphics cards from different hardware vendors and support virtual monitors created for each adapter. For example, if you have 1 NVIDIA GRID card and 1 Radeon AMD card on the same machine, you can mount 1 virtual monitor for NVDIA and 1 virtual monitor for AMD (but you can do the same with virtual display drivers mounted on Microsoft Basic Display Adapter). The frames captured with NVDIA will be compressed with NvENC and the frames captured with AMD will be compressed with AMF, with 0 CPU copies (however, frames captured by software adapters may be still compressed by hardware adapters, if available). Codecs are negotiated per adapter, so the client will be able to pick the best codec for decoding the frames with the video format supported by the adapter (i.e. AV1, H.264…).

The next version of TMD with these features available will be released in the next weeks.

In the download page, you can find the last version of TMD with some improvements. As announced before, the most relevant feature is the support for multiple adapters / GPU on the same machine.

TMD Viewer

Features:

• Support multiple codecs negotiation per adapter

Bug fixes:

• Small glitches when menu items are grayed

TMD Server

Features:

• Automatic audio driver recognition, no need to restart tmd server
• Support hardware encoding multiple adapters / GPUs on the same machine
• Negotiate codecs for best matching available adapters

Bug fixes:

• Too many warnings in log file when audio device was not available
• Warnings in log file when screen could not be captured

I released the first stable version of TMD 2025.0 for Windows, you can find it in the download page. This is absolutely a new start for this amazing software. Now TMD is a complete windows service that you can install with few clicks in your PC desktop and access into it immediately, without any additional setting (you don’t even need to restart your PC). This is the first absolute version, so you may find bugs or limitations, but do not worry. There will be many other releases of this software, to incrementally fix bugs and implement new features. In this new version, you can find many news. UAC screens, win-logon, resolution change, multi-monitors, NvENC / AMF hardware encoding in AV1 / H.264 format, d3d11va hardware decoding, audio device detection, support for audio multi-channel up to surround 7.1, clipboard channel and more. For the first time, you can install it on a remote virtual machine (like EC2 t2.micro) and use it already, without any additional software. In the next days, I will write the documentation, that is still missing. I will create also videos on youtube, to show the new software functionalities and how to use it. In the newt few weeks, I will release the Linux version. Long life to TMD!

I really wanted to release TMD 2025.0 for the end of this month, but I think I will postpone it for the end of August. I’m fixing a couple of issues on Linux that required more time than I expected. I prefer to have a stable product instead of rushing into a last minute release. I will have more time for testing and writing the documentation. Thanks for your patience.

Good news from LA MPEG team. Hardware H.264 encoding / decoding can be used in TMD without paying a license fee. H.264 encoding will increase compatibility for hardware that doesn’t yet support AV1 encoding, like my GeForce 3000 series or g4dn / g4ad / g5 EC2 instances.

I decided to release TMD for free for personal use and paid for business use / commercial purposes. This will make things much easier and shorten the release time. Users around the world will have the opportunity to use TMD for free and try it for their needs, without limitations on features and without a 30-day trial. Gamers, for example, will be able to use TMD for free in competition with existing free software (such as Sunshine + Moonlight), the same goes for casual users who want to use it in EC2 as an alternative to software that is already free in EC2, such as DCV. In this way, it will be possible to release the software in its early stages of development, avoiding the complexity of a software that charges for features and not for use. Hopefully, the first stable version of TMD 2025 should be released for the end of July 2025.

Now hardware encoding will be supported on NVIDIA series GPUs with NvEnc in AV1 and H264 formats. In this early stage, I was already able to stream at more than 60 FPS in 4K and more than 120 FPS in Full HD with a GeForce RTX 3070. From now, most of the AMD (with AMF) and NVIDIA GPUs will be able to stream with hardware encoding and decoding.

In addition to AV1, now it’s possible to encode with H.264 format. This is particularly useful in GPUs without support for AV1 encoding, like GeForce 10×0, 20×0 and 30×0 series or g4ad, g4dn and g5 instances in EC2. The h.264 licensing has to be clarified with MPEG LA. In this development stage, TMD can be used with H.264 without problems. Probably in the future it will be enabled in paid products while AV1 will be available only for free.

Now hardware decoding is complete. I implemented the client-side graphics pipeline, so the decoded frame can be copied directly from GPU memory into screen texture without passing from the CPU. As result, I was able to stream at 60 FPS in 4K resolution against my laptop for the first time, thanks also to hardware encoding. Given the 0 CPU copy on both server and client side, I can announce that now TMD has the same streaming performance of Sunshine + Moonlight, which is a great result. For having 120 FPS in 4K, I need a more powerful graphics card than my laptop, but it’s perfectly possible.

Now it’s possible to use the GPU on AMD graphics cards (RDNA2+) to encode frames in AV1 format.