Has anyone noticed slow performance on Macbook air or MacBook pro? I'm using Houdini apprentice and going through basic tutorials, just getting familiar with the layout and functionality, etc. I've noticed that this software seems very unresponsive for even the most basic tasks like placing and deleting primitives… at times it will be quite snappy and responsive but then bog down and give me the colored pinwheel every half a dozen actions or so..

I've attached a clip of me placing and deleting a primitive, there is almost a full second between the time I click in the viewport to place the primitive and the time it appears. Then a similar lag when I delete it.


Thank you.

Your macbook may have two graphics card. Make sure Houdini is running on the faster card, not the intel graphics.

I wouldn't expect a lot out of Houdini on mac, let alone a laptop.

Enivob
I wouldn't expect a lot out of Houdini on mac, let alone a laptop.

And you'd be wrong…enjoy that Linux command-line!


Back to the OP….yes, something is wrong about Houdini Apprentice in OSX and it has nothing to do with how powerful your machine is. By comparison Houdini Indie on my lowly Mac Book Air runs super smoothly and it's as responsive as you'd expect. I reported the incorrect behavior but it doesn't seem to be a priority for SideFX. I suspect that what might be happening in Houdini Apprentice might be related to the licensing portion of the app.

On the plus side, if you consider updating to the paid version of Houdini, it will be snappy and as fast as your machine will allow.

But yeah, considering that Apprentice is supposed to be a sales tool for them, SideFX really needs to fix this weirdness.

Midphase
But yeah, considering that Apprentice is supposed to be a sales tool for them, SideFX really needs to fix this weirdness.

Thanks for your response Midpahse, incidentally today I ran apprentice on the pc I have at work (which is a very capable machine) and I noticed some similar lag…though not quite as bad as on my mac. I agree with you that if the issue is simply with the apprentice version its an unfortunate oversight. The lag really doesn't help sell the paid versions.

MB

I would contact SideFX Support, let them know about the issue and ask them if they will issue you a limited-time Indie license to test the responsiveness on your system.

I had the exact same experience on my brand new MacBook Pro 16" – Apprentice was laggy to the point of being unusable. I upgraded to Indie and the difference was night and day. I guess you can say the lagginess did actually help sell the paid version in my case….

To everyone having the same issue, I spoke with support and they told me that it's actually a known bug and it's affecting many Indie users as well. This is the bug id: #105946 (unfortunately, the bug tracker is only visible to users of the full commercial versions).
I'm still using the Apprentice (tested 17 and 18 under macOS Mojave) but I'll probably switch soon to Indie in order to complete a project, I'll update this post in case things get better.

Not sure if this part of the same issue, but ever since version 18 I've experienced laggy cursor performance in all viewports. 17.5 was as snappy and responsive as you'd expect, but no matter what computer I try it on (all Macs though), the cursor feels laggy and spongey, kind of like the lazy mouse feature in a painting or sculpting app.

I made a quick screen recording of the difference… 17.5 is the top half and you can see that the geometry node remains stuck beneath the cursor. 18 is the bottom half and the geometry node lags behind the movement of the cursor.

vvzen
To everyone having the same issue, I spoke with support and they told me that it's actually a known bug and it's affecting many Indie users as well. This is the bug id: #105946 (unfortunately, the bug tracker is only visible to users of the full commercial versions).
I'm still using the Apprentice (tested 17 and 18 under macOS Mojave) but I'll probably switch soon to Indie in order to complete a project, I'll update this post in case things get better.

I am using Houdini 18.5 Indie(tried all build up to 437) and I am impacted by this issue. Houdini will become slower and slower after 10 minutes of use. Complexity of the scene does not matter in my case as I get this problem with a simple sphere. The UI becomes laggy to the point it’s unusable and I can only solve the problem by restarting.
I am using an iMac Pro 10 cores with 64gb RAM and Big Sur 11.1.
Talked to support and associated my case to the same ticket number. I would love to know what is causing this issue so I could possibly work around it but so far Support has not been able to provide any more details or workaround.
Knowing this issue was opened in June makes me very worried as I can’t work in this condition.
Any help would be much appreciated.

I don't know if this will help anyone else, but I was also experiencing a significant decrease in UI responsiveness over time on a mac, requiring frequent restarts. I tracked my issue down to my Logitech mouse software - the update rate was set to 1000 times per second, which was apparently overwhelming some aspect of Houdini's input monitoring. I set this to it's minimum (125 times per second) and my issues completely went away. This had not been an issue with Houdini 18.0, just 18.5.

Also experiencing this exact issue since the last few 18.5 updates. I get the sense it is overloading the GPU despite the geometry in the scene being simple (like one sphere). VRAM becomes quickly maxed out while doing relatively little and the app slows to a crawl until it crashes or I need to restart it. When I’ve inquired before about other viewport problems, the help desk claims my 2019 Mac Pro graphics card isn’t officially supported; but, um, it has been out for 2 years now. Does a company actually support Mac if it only supports discontinued hardware?

This only started three updates ago and a fresh install hasn’t helped. Hopefully it’d addressed soon.

——

jdmorani

vvzen
To everyone having the same issue, I spoke with support and they told me that it's actually a known bug and it's affecting many Indie users as well. This is the bug id: #105946 (unfortunately, the bug tracker is only visible to users of the full commercial versions).
I'm still using the Apprentice (tested 17 and 18 under macOS Mojave) but I'll probably switch soon to Indie in order to complete a project, I'll update this post in case things get better.

I am using Houdini 18.5 Indie(tried all build up to 437) and I am impacted by this issue. Houdini will become slower and slower after 10 minutes of use. Complexity of the scene does not matter in my case as I get this problem with a simple sphere. The UI becomes laggy to the point it’s unusable and I can only solve the problem by restarting.
I am using an iMac Pro 10 cores with 64gb RAM and Big Sur 11.1.
Talked to support and associated my case to the same ticket number. I would love to know what is causing this issue so I could possibly work around it but so far Support has not been able to provide any more details or workaround.
Knowing this issue was opened in June makes me very worried as I can’t work in this condition.
Any help would be much appreciated.

joenyc
VRAM becomes quickly maxed out while doing relatively little and the app slows to a crawl until it crashes or I need to restart it.

I'm not running into those types of issues on my machine, but it's hard to tell without opening up your actual .hip file.

What I will say is that, ever since I started using Houdini, I think 18.5 has been one of the buggiest release, especially for Mac users. Maybe Apple will assist them in porting over to ARM CPU's in the future and that will improve things, but for the time being it can be a bit frustrating at times.

I'm having major lag issues and quite frankly, it's getting really tedious.

iMac 2019; i9 10-core / 64GB DDR4 / Radeon Pro Vega 48 8GB / 2TB SSD / Houdini Indie 18.5.761-Houdini Indie 19.0.363 / Mac OS 12 (Monterey)

I am running my activity monitor to see what is actually going on, while drawing a mask on a hf node tree (comprising of 16 nodes, all super basic) my CPU jumped to 1500%, GPU 46%. I'm painting a mask. The paint line can take between 10-15 seconds to up to a minute to show up. It's painful. I was having this issue both in Big Sur and now Monterey.

I've contacted SideFX about this, I get a link back to download the latest builds. The latest builds are no faster. If anything, it seems the latest builds are just the previous builds with a new 18.5.xxx at the end.

Could the 3D world support us Mac users a lot better, last I checked SideFX wasn't suing Apple.