Starting with Houdini 21, the minimum x86-64 architecture level for Linux and Windows is now v3. This enables us to use many more features that are provided in modern processors such as AVX, AVX2 and hardware-based half-precision floating point support. Unfortunately in order to take advantage of newer features, we need to drop support for some older processors. Therefore, starting with Houdini 21, Houdini will no longer be compatible with processors that don't support x86-64-v3, e.g. Intel processors older than Haswell from 2013 or AMD processors older than Excavator from 2015. macOS x86-64 builds will continue to be built for v2.
You can verify if your processor is supported by checking to see if it supports AVX and AVX2 instructions.
Linux users can utilize the following command to verify support:
grep '^flags' /proc/cpuinfo | sort -u | grep -c avx2 && echo "Supported"
Windows users can utilize tools such as CPU-Z to verify support:
https://www.cpuid.com/softwares/cpu-z.html [
www.cpuid.com]
