Dear Sidefx,

what is the optimal hardware and/or operating system for houdini?

on windows the UI redrawing sometimes slow and faulty a little, maybe its better to run on linux? Or its better on an SGI hardware?

Did you say BEST? Check this:

http://www.sgi.com/visualization/onyx/350/ir/ [sgi.com]

i hope you have deep pockets! ;-)
b.

I'm not sure there's a simple answer to your question, since obviously Ben's response was a tease. I suspect you meant reliable, trouble-free hardware? There is no “best”, however, I would recommend using some sort of unix-y solution, since that's where Houdini started, and there always seems to be little things that crop up with Windows. After that, if you're looking for reliability - well, I'm obviously a Linux fan - we use them and they're great. Cheaper than SGI, more production-friendly than Windows, and with (arguably) more software available than Solaris. But then I'm biased.

We've had very good experiences with Geforce cards and Nvidia's Linux detonater drivers, however you will always have little glitches if you use the consumer based gaming cards like geforce4 TI. They're *usable*, but you get little problems. Others hack their geforce 3's and are very happy, but for production we use geforce4 quadros…we're happy with those. We run Redhat 7.3(recommended over 8 and 9 for production - in fact 9 doesn't work at all).

Apart from all that, the latest ATI cards are supposed to be quite good - previous generations either suffered horribly or lacked decent Linux drivers - but I've heard from more and more people that they're much better now.

Otherwise - be sure to check out SESI's recommended hardware on their web page - it's a *little* behind the times, since things change every month in this biz, but it's a start.

Hope this is a little useful…

Cheers,

J.C.

Thank you for your answer J.C.

Hmm, I tried to run on a Dell Inspiron 8200 laptop computer:
winXP, ati radeon mobility 9000 64MB, 1GB RAM, 1.8Mhz P4, latest dell ati drivers…

Its running quite well relative its a laptop, but there are some annoying issue:

In the parameter window if its not fit to it, (the scrollbar visible), it doesn't refresh when I switch to an other category (e.g from transformation to shading), if all the parameter fits to the window pane then its working fine.

It should be some double buffer issue, when I switch off the double buffering its working well, but then the 3D viewport looks awful diring any interaction.

Xray function has no effect at all. (in Maya xray working well on the same machine)

any idea?

sipi