I think that many of people can find some of these info useful.
I experienced various crashes and bugs with houdini combined with my ati x600 on winXP, I tried omega drivers, some problems were solved, some stayed, overall it wasn't possible to work. HOUDINI_OGL_SOFTWARE = 1 did the job, but things were incredibly slow. and then I tried this:
uninstall driver;
extract catalyst 6.4;
go to device manager, display adapter, update/install driver
and
install with “choose what to install” option;
click “have disk”;
browse to inf file extracted a minutre ago and find/select a driver that matches your card version BUT with some pro/gold name.
like: Celestica Gold Edition Radeon x600/geCube radeon x600 PRO
install it;
start Houdini, and enjoy…
maybe this isn't the most elegant way, but somehow it works…

last two dayz I worked/tested houdini, and I didn't crashed it even once, which is great thing considering the fact that with old way of using ati drivers it was crashing every day several times.
so there must be something in my theory. not quite sure what, but there is something…
it would be good if someone else try this.
respect

I'm using Houdini on Thinkpad with ATI FireGL V3200.. with totally happyness since a month

cheers

yeah. I know that fire gls work fine.
mine is plain'n'simple x600…

Is their a way to run Houdini proper on my computer?
Amd Sempron +3400 2.4ghz 512mb ram, with a onboard video card (ATI RADEON X200m) 128MB…
It kinda works slow,

Even works on a intel iMac in boot camp!

runs and renders on my p4 3.06, 1gig ram, 5650 ultra 256 nvid card. on XP pro,

i haven't tested it in linux yet , but don't forsee any issues hardware wise.. ( any one have a distro preferance? current install is SUSE 9.2, any buggs reported with it?)


your semperon is benchmarked at just as fast or slightly faster then my p4,
so i'd look to the vid card , or ram. personally i'd upgrade your ram first it's cheaper and even if ift dosn't fix it. more ram never hurts.

The Radeon 600x has a huge memory leak problem with houdini under XP that causes your ram to fill up as the interface redraws (during playback) and crash houdini once you run out of memory. That was probably what was crashing your houdini several times a day. Odforce has this documented on their wiki.

Forcing ogl software rendering with HOUDINI_OGL_SOFTWARE = 1 solves the problem but makes everything run painfully slow. Turning Double buffer off also stops the memory leak but you get anoying refresh lines.

You are saying that this fancy named version of the catalyst driver resolves the memory leak problem? If you press play on houdini dosen't your memory usage rise slowly but shurely?

This sounds too good to be true!

no memory leaking. at least not for now. I am doing lessons from gnomon's dvd and I haven't had a crash… Same thing with tutorials from sidefx… no crash…

sony vaio a317 notebook, winXPpro, intel M processor, 1gb ram, ati x600 with
GeCube Radeon x600 PRO driver… I don't have mobility options supported with this drivers but houdini runs smooothly, so who cares about battery life
It's houdini 8.1

Hope this will work for others too.

so this doesnt work for macbook pros….anyone have any ideas for updating the drivers for ati mobility 1600 in xp running in bootcamp on a macbook pro???? this is really frustrating…it keeps crashing while trying to register. installed fine, but wont work or register.