Hi guys,
I'm experiencing low view-port performance in Houdini Apprentice under os x 10.6 on the new MacBook PRO 17".
The new graphic card is this: AMD Radeon HD 6750M with 1GB GDDR5

So I was wondering if there's anything I can do to make it run faster or if I just have to wait for a daily build to fix this?

Many thanks,
Adrian

I have the very same laptop and am not experiencing any significant slow downs in day-to-day Houdini use.

The Houdini interface does slow down significantly if you have the Dock open all the time. I submitted this bug submitted on the CG Talk Houdini forum. For the time being, please auto-stow the Dock and see if that brings back the interactivity to the Houdini interface.

If not, please elaborate your situation in more detail. See the sticky post on how to submit bugs and RFE's here:
http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_forum&Itemid=172&page=viewtopic&t=15603 [sidefx.com]

Hi,

There is a problem too when for example, if you play animation and you place your cursor over stop button, the help dialog appears ‘stop animation’, at this time, the animation would be very very slow.

i'm on mac pro with nvidia GTX 285.

Thanks for the reply guys. I was comparing the performance with my old desktop that has a 4 years old nvidia with 512 ram and a lower CPU. Both in Windows and under Ubuntu runs better that on the MBP.

I'll keep digging

There is a problem too when for example, if you play animation and you place your cursor over stop button, the help dialog appears ‘stop animation’, at this time, the animation would be very very slow.

It sounds like OSX's desktop compositing manager is doing extra work that is affecting performance when another window is partially overlapping the main Houdini window. I still have OSX 10.6.6 installed, I'll check to see if this is a recent performance regression in 10.6.7.

Thanks for the reply guys. I was comparing the performance with my old desktop that has a 4 years old nvidia with 512 ram and a lower CPU. Both in Windows and under Ubuntu runs better that on the MBP.

Apple writes their own OpenGL implementation, while Nvidia and AMD provide the underlying driver. Unfortunately, while Apple has made some improvements in OpenGL performance recently, they're still behind AMD and Nvidia's own OpenGL implementations in a lot of ways.

twod
It sounds like OSX's desktop compositing manager is doing extra work that is affecting performance when another window is partially overlapping the main Houdini window. I still have OSX 10.6.6 installed, I'll check to see if this is a recent performance regression in 10.6.7.

I still have 10.6.6 too. Is it possible this problem come from when i have 2 houdini running at the same time ? Like when you launch from examples help ?

Another question, do you try Houdini on OSX Lion 10.7 ? What about the “new” openGL 3.x implementation and houdini ?

I still have 10.6.6 too. Is it possible this problem come from when i have 2 houdini running at the same time ? Like when you launch from examples help ?

Two Houdinis would use up more VRAM, so it's possible that it would cause some slowdowns if the resources from both sessions didn't fit in the GPU memory all at once. However, that seems like a slightly different issue than the one here, where performance is affected by a small occlusion on the main Houdini window.

Another question, do you try Houdini on OSX Lion 10.7 ? What about the “new” openGL 3.x implementation and houdini ?

I'm afraid I can't comment on unreleased Apple software. However, in general OpenGL 3.2 brings some very useful optimizations to the table.

Thanks for replies

I've been getting massive slowdowns also…

Houdini 11.0.547, 11.0.658
macbook pro
OSX 10.6.6
Intel Core i7
2.66 GHz
Intel HD Graphics/NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M

the viewport doesn't update at all - unless I minimize Houdini or pop another window in front of the viewport then pop back to Houdini - not the fastest way to work…also the menus don't display properly most of the time - TAB brings up a blank rectangle but typing a specific OP will display the tool name 50% of the time…

let me know if you need any more info…

on the other hand it keeps me from doing work at home

There does seem to be a performance drop introduced in 10.6.7 when the doc is over Houdini. On a Quadro 4000, this seemed like about a 10% drop in playback performance (qualitatively). This wasn't there in 10.6.6; it made no difference if the dock was over Houdini or not, and the playback speed was about that of 10.6.7 when the dock was not in play.

The viewport doesn't update at all - unless I minimize Houdini or pop another window in front of the viewport then pop back to Houdini - not the fastest way to work…also the menus don't display properly most of the time - TAB brings up a blank rectangle but typing a specific OP will display the tool name 50% of the time…

However, I can't reproduce the issues with the blank viewport. It might be due to the mobile Nvidia chipset having different driver characteristics than the discrete Nvidia cards I've tested. I've also noticed that Apple's software renderer will often leave new dialogs blank (found that out when I forgot to update Nvidia's Quadro 4000 driver after the 10.6.7 update). In Help > About Houdini, Show Details, does it indicate that you're using Nvidia's driver or Apple's Software Renderer? There was also a lot of sluggishness with the software mode.

If you are in Software mode, try downloading a driver from Nvidia's driver site - there's one there for the 330M for Mac OSX 10.6.7 (but not 10.6.6). Perhaps Apple has dropped native support for it in 10.6.7? :shock: They're certainly been dropping Nvidia cards for AMD's offerings lately.

Apples GPU drivers tend to be barely usable at best! Nice design on their hardware and stuff but, Does not look like Apple care so much about the details anymore Iproducts is all they care for these days.

I also ran into this problem last night after updating to 10.6.7 from 10.6.5 on a MacBook Air with Nvidia GeForce 320M.

The viewport would freeze for a few seconds prior to every other tumble/dolly/pan action; TAB menu froze for a few seconds before it fully displayed (before that, a blank rectangle). Shelf tools (primitives, particles) took up to 20 seconds to create the object in the viewport.

I ended up rolling back to 10.6.6 by reinstalling Mac OSX and the 10.6.6 Combo Update (http://support.apple.com/kb/dl1349) [support.apple.com] manually and it's working great now.

I went with the reinstall because I haven't had this MacBook for too long and everything is already backed up. Reinstalling OSX may not be an option for everyone so please use caution if you were to try this yourself.

Here is the MacBook's spec for reference:

MacBook Air 3,2 (Late 2010)
2.13GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
4 GB RAM
Nvidia GeForce 320M with 256 MB RAM
OSX 10.6.6
Tested with Houdini 11.0.547 and 11.0.701

hiding the dock helps tremendously…stupid apple…

this is what Houdini is using:
Platform: darwin-x86_64-gcc4.2-MacOSX10.6
OpenGL Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
OpenGL Renderer: NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M OpenGL Engine
OpenGL Version: 2.1 NVIDIA-1.6.26
OpenGL Shading Language: 1.20

I'm having a similar issue where on my Macbook Pro 17" the viewport is slow. It only occurs with shading turned on.

arctor, what dock are you talking about? Is it on Mac or Houdini?

Have you applied the latest OS X and EFI Firmware updates? if not run Software Update and apply these.