I've uninstalled my old version of Houdini and then installed the latest version 9 . . . When invoking the license server, I am told I have the non-commercial licenses installed and recognized. When trying to launch Houdini from my Vista/HP laptop, the application closes before launching. I tried running under XP compatibility mode and running the program as administrator, with no different effect. What to do now - I'm a potential starving artist purchaser - but won't buy if it won't run?

Thanks,

Greg Smith

What version of vista do you use?
What make of graphics card?

I'm able to run h9 on vista enterprise with an nvidia card. Haven't tried with ATI.

I am using Vista Home Premium Edition - the one that comes standard on this HP F500 Presario, (AMD Athlon 64 bit dual processor 32 bit operating system).

The graphics card is standard Nvidia - Geoforce Go 6100.

Greg Smith

Check to make sure your opengl for the graphics card is actually implemented. Then check to see how much ram your graphics card is allowed to use.

probbins:

I'm sure the graphics card is applied and I have tried a “balanced” openGL setting, as well as allowing the application to decide which features are enabled. Nothing has allowed Houdini to launch so far.

Thanks,

Greg Smith

I think the problem could be that the Go6100 only allows you to use up to 128MB of video memory (actually main memory), which may be too small for Houdini to run. I've heard that Vista's driver model also takes up more memory, so that could be part of the issue.

Try setting the environment variable:

HOUDINI_OGL_SOFTWARE 1

and see if that helps. I don't know where in the new interface the environment variables are set, unfortunately – still on XP (they're in Control Panel -> System on XP).

I've just bought a new machine, a QuadCore thingy with a 768mb Geforce 8800 GTX - upon which I'm crippling it with Vista (32bit)

Anyhow, I cannot run Houdini until *after* I've played Crysis. (Technically, not motivationally, unfortunately). Crysis must be clearing the pipes of something in the hardware or the drivers.. perhaps there is some “extended” initialization on Vista you can perform that Crysis is doing and Houdini is not?

I've “heard/read” that in Vista on cards that support DirectX 10 and so on, OpenGL is now basically being run as DX on the backend by windows. This could be a rather large problem for OpenGL apps I would think. But I'm no expert obviously.