Hi,

I purchased a new notebook with config Intel i7 2630, nVidia Geforce GT 550M 2GB. ( I believe they come preloaded with latest drivers)

So I launch Houdini 11.0.446.9, and do alt+v, i see the openGL renderer as Intel HD graphics. How do i set it to nvidia?

My issues are similar to the ones mentioned earlier in the forum, parts of the UI display going black, the parameters tab or the main menus too showing inconsistent display.

Please help me with a solution.

Also, what is the expected performance/optimization that houdini can derive out of this graphics card? ( this laptop is for my personal but intensive graphics work)

Looking forward to reply from SideFX and others…

Houdini just uses whatever OpenGL driver that is currently installed so this is an OS issue, or possibly hardware configuration issue.

Edward was right. So with nvidia control panel you can force the preferred GPU. I could set it to work with Houdini

But the UI issues persisted with release 658 and Houdini used to crash with minor interactions throwing a openGL driver error.

However, I upgraded to 701 and all those issues do not appear any more.

I think i spoke too soon. I still cannot harness viewport shading effect with Material Shader turned on in effect tab. Houdini crashes.

Not really sure what the problem is but you really should be posting your specs. In Houdini, go to the main Help menu and choose About. Turn on Show Details and post the result.

Another user in the forum reported that turning off Nvidia Optimus resolved the issue. It uses the discrete Nvidia GPU all the time however, so this will cut into your battery life. I don't know if a reboot is required after changing the setting, but if not, you may want to only disable Optimus when running Houdini.

check the attached screen shots. Optimus by default chooses intel. I forced Houdini to use nvidia. I couldnt get to do extensive tests yet.