Hello all,

I just would like to get some clarification on the H14 Mac GPU requirements. This is my current system specs:
OSX 10.10.1. Late 2011 MacBook Pro, 2.5 GHz, Intel Core i7, 16 GB RAM, AMD Radeon HD 6770M 1024 MB.

However, unfortunately, H14 has become unusable for me. I can no longer select points or primitives in the viewport. Switching to vertex selection mode instantly crashes Houdini.

Everything else seems to be working though (fluid sims - both pyro and FLIP), fracturing, bullet, cloth, FEM, particles, DOPs in general.

So i'm hoping this is more of a viewport bug that can be fixed, rather than having to purchase a new computer (this comp isn't that old and it worked perfectly fine with H13).

So, it had me researching computers just in case. Here's what I found and what has me a bit confused. It seems as though the very best iMac or Macbook Pro are not supported in H14 at all in terms of GPU? Is this correct?

Here are the specs:
New Macbook Pro: NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M with 2GB GDDR5 memory
New iMac: AMD Radeon R9 M295X with 4GB of GDDR5 memory

None of these cards show up in the “Supported Mac Graphics Cards” section but they seem to show up in the “Supported Mobile Graphics Cards” section.

Here is the list of “Supported Mac Graphics Cards”:

OSX 10.8 or higher required (Mountain Lion, Mavericks, Yosemite)
AMD FirePro D300, D500, D700
AMD Radeon 5770
AMD Radeon 5870
AMD Radeon 7970 for Mac
ATI Radeon 2600XT for Mac

Nvidia Quadro K5000 for Mac
Nvidia Quadro 4000 for Mac
Nvidia Quadro FX 4800 for Mac
Nvidia GT120

Intel HD Graphics 5000, 4000, 3000

There are some outstanding issues with older AMD and Intel GPUs. AMD 5000-6000 series, Intel HD4000, HD2500

Here is the list of “Supported Mobile Graphics Cards”:
Mobile GPU should be mid-to-high end, performance-wise, for production work.
Nvidia Quadro FX x600M and up (eg, 1600M, 3600M, 1700M; second digit in Quadro model number indicates the generation).
Nvidia Quadro M series (eg 4000M), Quadro K M series (eg Quadro K4000M)
Nvidia GEForce 8000M series, 9000M series, GT 100M to 900M series. x50 or higher (eg, GTX 650).
AMD FirePro M series
AMD Mobility Radeon 5000, 6000, 7000, 8000 series (x700M and up, eg 7740M, 7987M or 8850M)
AMD Mobility Radeon M200 series (M260 - M295)

I bring this up because if the GPUs in fact fall under the “mobile category”, then my current macbook pro's GPU can be found in the “Supported Mobile GPUs” category. AMD Radeon HD 6770M 1024 MB. Which opens the question, are the selection issues I am having in the viewport a bug? Or are NONE of the new imac and macbook pros (including my late 2011 mbp), simply not supported in H14? I'm really hoping it's just a viewport bug and that the mobile mac gpu's fall under the Supported Mobile GPUs category.

FYI: The new Mac Pro's GPU does in fact fall under the Supported Mac Graphics Card section: Dual AMD FirePro D700 GPUs with 6GB of GDDR5 VRAM on each GPU. Which still leaves me questioning which category does the mobile mac gpu's fall under?

Thanks for the help!

Well it is because they are mobile chips. I have 750M and it works fine for me. I guess they need to fine-tune this release more for Mac users. Fill bug report and they will solve it if possible, if not you have excuse for buying new laptop

Hello,

The little GT 65OM works pretty fine with the 14.0.224 build on my macbook pro but I had to switch to Yosemite in order to get a better Open GL version (3.3 is needed). Some strange (but graphically interesting !) ogl display errors but nothing too bad.

Cheers.

Yeah, I was using Mavericks and thought that possibly upgrading to Yosemite might do the trick. Unfortunately it didn't help. Still can't select points or primitives in the viewport. Actually it just makes an incorrect selection. If I select the top left point of a grid, i get a random distribution of points selected throughout the grid instead. Basically makes “fundamentals” in Houdini impossible to work with.

I actually did file a bug report. I got a response to upgrade to Yosemite. I did that but haven't heard back. The last reply I sent was about my confusion of the graphics cards requirement. Before I sent a bug report, I had sent an email to support about the issue. They simply stated that my GPU is not supported. I replied that my GPU shows up in the supported mobile cards section. They replied, you have to look at the support Mac gpu section.

This led to my confusion about what GPU falls under what category. That's when I started looking up new mac's gpu's. Since none of the “best” mobile gpu based macs on the market seem to show up in the supported mac gpu section, then it seems like they are being considered under the mobile gpu section, which my card actually is under. And before I cough up another xxx g's to buy a new computer, I want to make sure I know for sure what's going on. I'm also getting quite a few responses like yours from others, that their “little mobile gpus” aren't having any of these issues.

Well, I feel exactly the same, I use Houdini on my huge Windows (hate it) 48 threads workstation at work but I need to test millions of set up on MacBook Pro at home (love it), it was such a pleasure with H13 that I was ready to buy anything that work with Houdini 14, even a huge heavy ugly PC laptop…

But…

1/ Daily builds are better end better even on my 650M (1G).

2/ Apple might put some 850M (4G) in the next MBP generation.

So maybe we can wait a little.

Cheers.

Hi Guys I am in the same boat as you can see from my specs. last night I just upgraded to OSX 10.10.2 in the hope there might be an improvement. H13 was never perfect but usable to prototype ideas. H14 has been a total disaster. Even if I upgrade my macbook pro I will have to buy the top line 15inch version as its the only one with a nvidia card.

Will report on my upgraded OS

Rob

I appreciate your comments. Not that I wish it upon anyone, but it's good to know that i'm not alone on this one. I will be sure to keep you all updated… For now, H14 is unusable on my Macbook Pro.

Apple has been able to reproduce several of the issues we sent them last week and verified them as bugs, so hopefully these will be resolved soon (no ETAs were mentioned). In the meantime, we will continue to look at workarounds where possible.

Thanks for the update! If there is anything I can do to help, please let me know.

FWIW I have a MacBook Pro w/ an NVidia 750m and I'm also running into hard crashes whenever I switch to the move tool in Vertex mode. It's a shame as I was really getting excited to learn Houdini (w/ the Apprentice version) but being unable to edit points makes my pursuit something of a non-starter.

Yeah, it's been a bit brutal on my side. I teach Houdini and a number of my students use macbook pros, including myself. Currently H14 is unusable for us, so we are using H13 for the time being.

Houdini 14 is very unstable on Macbook pro (Nvidia 750m) using Mac OS X Yosemite. I did not test it on the same laptop using Windows version yet.

@tinyparticle, @itriix, and @d_keith, are you all running the latest 14.0 daily build? After release there were a number of changes put in to work around crashes when using nVidia cards under OSX. If it is still crashing, please submit crash logs as bugs!

On another thread (https://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_forum&Itemid=172&page=viewtopic&t=37374) [sidefx.com] various users have been reporting improvements in stability since the initial release.

Thanks,
Mark

Hi mtucker,

As pointed out in my initial post, my mbp has an AMD Radeon HD 6770M, which was the best card offered for my 17 inch macbook pro. I have tried both production and daily builds with no success. The computer, while a few years old is very capable and runs H13 with no problems at all. It also seems to do fine running simulations and doing other intense tasks in H14… The only issue I am having as of right now is the point/poly/vert selection issue in the 3d viewport. However, without the ability to do that, it renders H14 useless for me currently.

Also, I still have not had any kind of verification as to where the mobile mac gpu's fall under in terms of the “supported gpu” categories. I went into a fair amount of detail in my first post, but just to re-iterate:

Do the Mobile Mac GPUs fall under the “Supported Mac GPUs” or “Supported Mobile GPUs” category? If it is “Supported Mac GPUs”, then basically NONE of the Mac Mobile GPUs are supported if that is the case. The most recent iMac and Macbook Pro GPUs don't show up in that category. However, I do see them in the “Supported Mobile GPUs” category. The AMD Radeon HD 6770M GPU can also be found in the “Supported Mobile GPUs” category.

And so once again, it leaves me very curious… Are these Mac Mobile GPUs supported or not? It makes it really tough to determine if a new computer is absolutely needed just because of a point/poly/vert viewport selection problem.

Scwhooo, that's a mouthful. Just looking for clarification and also, as mentioned, if there are tests, or other things that I can be doing to help out, please let me know and i'd be glad to help.

It's under Mobile GPUs:

AMD Mobility Radeon 5000, 6000, 7000, 8000 series (x700M and up, eg 7740M, 7987M or 8850M)

Unfortunately with the sheer number of models released per generation, and the somewhat arbitrary naming scheme used, it's difficult to list all of them.

Note that you can work around the selection issue by using Frustum selection (Shift+V). This particular driver bug affects OSX:AMD mobile GPUs only, and only with the Visible Geometry Only selection option. H13 didn't have this option on the Mac, so it's not any different than the way you've selected things in the past.

The latest daily build is working a bit better for me - I can at least edit vertices now.

Sorry itriix, I must confess to only skimming the top half of this thread, and I didn't realize you were the OP

My comments were directed at anyone using nVidia on OSX.

Mark

twod
It's under Mobile GPUs:

AMD Mobility Radeon 5000, 6000, 7000, 8000 series (x700M and up, eg 7740M, 7987M or 8850M)

Unfortunately with the sheer number of models released per generation, and the somewhat arbitrary naming scheme used, it's difficult to list all of them.

Just for clarification:

Does this mean that listed Mobile GPUs are officially supported in combination with OSX? Or only these listed as “Supported Mac GPUs”.

Thanks

Yes, mobile GPUs on OSX that support GL3 are supported. They're just having a lot of issues at the moment, which we're addressing in conjunction with Apple.

Discrete GPUs seem to be fairing better on OSX. An AMD Radeon HD 5770, for example, doesn't have any issues with selection on OSX. Nor can I reproduce some of the Nvidia-specific OSX bugs on a Quadro 4000.

I will see if we can update that section to make it clearer.

twod
It's under Mobile GPUs:

AMD Mobility Radeon 5000, 6000, 7000, 8000 series (x700M and up, eg 7740M, 7987M or 8850M)

Unfortunately with the sheer number of models released per generation, and the somewhat arbitrary naming scheme used, it's difficult to list all of them.

Note that you can work around the selection issue by using Frustum selection (Shift+V). This particular driver bug affects OSX:AMD mobile GPUs only, and only with the Visible Geometry Only selection option. H13 didn't have this option on the Mac, so it's not any different than the way you've selected things in the past.

Thanks for the clarification. And I totally understand about all of the different models and generations not being listed. It's just good to know that my GPU is actually supported.

As for the shift-v trick, I hate to say it, but it didn't change a thing for me. I ensured that Select Visible Geometry was unchecked (and checked for that matter), both options give me the same result. I tried all of the other toggles and options to with no success. This issue happens with points, polys, edges and verts.

It is re-producable with the same result every time. If I create a grid, try and box select the top left corner point, I get a random distribution of points selected (as shown by the highlighting). To ensure it's not just a higlighting issue, I drop down an edit sop and transform the selection up and “all of the incorrectly selected/highlighted points” are translated up.

I'm including a very quick screen recording of the issue:
https://vimeo.com/119384290 [vimeo.com]

Honestly, the confusion about the supported/not supported GPU that I was having is mostly due to the fact that I initially emailed support about my issue and they responded that my GPU was not under the Supported Mac GPU list. I researched some more, saw my GPU in the Supported Mobile GPU list, so I responded back to support about this and they replied, “you have to look at the Supported Mac GPU list”… However, something still didn't sit right with me about this response, which led me to research the current mobile mac gpus on the market. Once I saw that none of them showed up in the Supported Mac GPUs list, but did show up in the Supported Mobile GPUs list, it had me suspecting more and more that what I was experiencing was indeed a bug and that my card was actually supported. So thank you for your clarification that my card is supported and that what i'm experiencing is indeed due to a bug. I will hold on tight for a future fix.