What on earth is going on!
It takes 20 seconds to uniform scale a default sphere on a brand new MacbookPro (2015)…

Just because it is a Mac does not mean it meets the minimum requirements for running Houdini. Have you compared the specs of your laptop against the hardware requirements?

Houdini won't work on my MacMini either.

I have 2.7Ghz i5, 8GB DDR3 RAM, Intel Iris 6100 (1.5GB).

Should be totally fine, in fact it should be blazing until I start doing sims or dealing with big data. I've run Houdini fine on 4GB ram, 2.4GHz Core2Duo from a 2008 MacbookPro, so something is up, what is it?

You probably missed the note:

Intel cards are not supported on the Mac.

https://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2680&Itemid=390 [sidefx.com]

Well that's terrible news!
What is the reasons for this? Is it going to be rectified any time soon?

Intel OpenGL drivers on OsX are very buggy, the slowdown you are seeing is the driver dropping form hardware to software renderer. You should see in the Activity Montior a process called Window Server when Houdini goes slow IIRC.

If you boot into Window or Linux you should be able to use Houdini with the latest Intel drivers.

SideFx Devs would have to comment on whether H16 will improve the situation or if it's entirely up to Apple to fix the bugs.

We read so much of this kind of messages these days …

I really wonder what's Apple developers answer about theses multiples concerns about drivers, they must have an answer I guess right?

I think Apple's reply would be to buy another/better Mac. Intel chips are not really for graphics processing, they are merely a placeholder display unit that is built into the Intel CPU. It cuts cost not having to add a GPU to the system. That is why the Intel chips are found on low-end/power system.

SideFX might want to consider detecting these low-end systems during the install process and refuse to install on a system that does not meet the hardware specs. It could avoid a lot of these posts about crashing and poor performance.

It is hard for a user with a relatively new Mac to accept that the computer they paid top dollar for is not even good enough to run professional software. Me being one of those users. I paid top dollar for a 16Gb 8 core i7 MacMini that can no longer run Houdini 15. (sad face).

Other software that bases their viewport code on OpenGL 2.0 specs still run fine. Houdini is out on a limb with their OpenGL 3.1 viewport experiment. I wish SideFX had put some code in there to gracefully fall back to the lower spec, however.

Even with a spec machine I don't experience any advantage over the OpenGL 3.1 viewport compared to the OpenGL 2.0 viewport experience in other apps.

I'm a huge supporter of SideFX and Houdini but I'm getting fed up of all the posts blaming Apple for their faulty drivers and other DCC applications that default to OpenGL 2 in the same manner as Houdini 13 - it's more complicated than that and in the case of other DCC applications defaulting to OpenGL 2 it's simply untrue.

I advise a number of studios that specialise in advertising and design visualisation (so not traditional SideFX customers but Houdini Engine has changed that situation over the last few years). Part of what I do involves benchmarking performance of a range of DCC applications and hardware configurations across Windows, OS X and Linux. Thankfully Houdini's Apprentice version makes this a simple process.

Whilst it's true that OS X has lost the edge as a pro 3d platform, of the major DCC's that are available for OS X (C4D, Maya, Modo & Houdini) only Houdini has such major OpenGL issues. The newest release of Modo, which came out today (full transparency - I'm a Modo beta tester) has a fantastic advanced viewport with IBL lighting that requires OpenGL 3.3 as a minimum and it works on both Nvidia and AMD cards including iMac's with AMD Radeons in the 6000 and 7000 ranges that end with an M (meaning they share resources with the CPU). It doesn't support non discrete Intel options but gracefully degrades and disables the ability for the artist to use the new advanced viewport features (everything else functions as before).

Here's the strange deal with Houdini. On Windows Houdini functions perfectly with Intel HD GPU's commonly found in laptops, the very same GPU's that aren't supported on OS X.

So my question is, why is it that every other DCC vendor can get their viewports functioning well on OS X (and in their latest versions too) but Houdini only supports:

AMD FirePro D300, D500, D700
AMD Radeon 5770, 5870, 7970

Nvidia Quadro K5000
Nvidia Quadro 4000
Nvidia 650M and 750M

SideFX have been doing so much over the last 5 years to make Houdini more artist friendly, more accessible, better documented, more apt for non FX/simulation heavy pipelines; and it's the only DCC application with a fair un-crippled Indie initiative for new young talent entering the creative industries. Not to mention that Mantra has gone from being a REYES centric convoluted TD tool to one of the fastest, most flexible, and yes, easy to use render technologies available.

So forgive me my minor rant, this situation of limited GPU support on OS X really needs to be resolved. No more excuses regarding pals at Apple that promise they'll remedy the situation in the SP. If SideFX's competitors have solved the problem surely SideFX can solve it too.

Modo 10 viewport has issues:

It would be in the best interest to fix 902. I just downloaded Modo 10v0.1 and the exact same issues occur. VBO turns Modo into a mess. But without it, meshes don't show up in the Advanced Viewport. And when I turn on VBO + Advanced Viewport, my FPS drops from over 200fps to 20-50fps and my mouse doesn't move like it does in Default. And eventually the viewport perspective changes and I lose sight of the options in top left.

http://community.thefoundry.co.uk/discussion/post.aspx?f=3&t=121500&p=1014696 [community.thefoundry.co.uk]

Marty, with all due respect. The issues are in no way similar. It's only the advanced viewport with all the settings turned up to 11 that causes problems for people (and then only with on certain GPU's). They still have a fully functioning default viewport to fall back on (and that default viewport is similar in features to Houdini's viewport).

And 20-30 FPS with HDR lighting, screen space reflections, AO and AA is actually a pretty decent frame rate for an old GPU.

hi Jonathan,

i have read somewhere that the houdini osx problem can be solved by sesi. the question is more is it worth it?

it's a huge task to solve the vendors driver bugs i mean in worst case a full time developer has to make solutions for fixing driver platform specified problems.

when i find the forum post where the developer made a statement i will link it to here. :-)

Thanks @mandrake0,

I'd be interested to read that post.

niietzshe
What on earth is going on!
It takes 20 seconds to uniform scale a default sphere on a brand new MacbookPro (2015)…

I don't experience this on either a Mac Pro or iMac. Have not tried on macbook pro yet. I am not having any OpenGL problems. Stability problems I was having related to corrupted preference folder or upstream cooking issues. Otherwise stable as a rock with 15.0.434 on Mac OS 10.11.4. I think OpenGL problems may have to do with the underlying graphics card hardware being used.

VR

Lars

niietzshe
What on earth is going on!
It takes 20 seconds to uniform scale a default sphere on a brand new MacbookPro (2015)…

Try build 15.0.441 (tomorrow's build). I don't believe it was properly detecting Iris 6100 as Intel Graphics, and thus it wasn't using all the workarounds we have in place for it.

Enivob
Other software that bases their viewport code on OpenGL 2.0 specs still run fine. Houdini is out on a limb with their OpenGL 3.1 viewport experiment. I wish SideFX had put some code in there to gracefully fall back to the lower spec, however.

We used to have a GL2.1 Renderer along with the GL3.3 renderer. It was simply too much maintenance to manage both, especially since it was hardly problem free on the Mac either (indeed, its main reason for existence was the Mac, since you either went full core profile or stayed legacy minus most of the perks of GL3/4). GL2.1 couldn't do HW-accelerated picking, so there was a ton of code needed just for re-implementing picking in software. And character-deforming crowds would have been impossible with GL2.1. With H14, we made the decision to go full core-GL3 and dropped it, and as a result have been able to move forward more quickly with a whole lot of viewport features.

GL2/GL1 might as well be a different API than GL3+ (aka “Modern GL”). It's like the difference between C and C++ - there's a lot of similarities on the surface, but how you use it is very different. It's not at all simple to “gracefully fall back”, I'm afraid.

Jonathan Moore2
Here's the strange deal with Houdini. On Windows Houdini functions perfectly with Intel HD GPU's commonly found in laptops, the very same GPU's that aren't supported on OS X.

Simply put, because Intel graphics with Intel's own Windows drivers works, and Intel graphics with OSX's driver does not provide a useable experience.

So my question is, why is it that every other DCC vendor can get their viewports functioning well on OS X (and in their latest versions too) but Houdini only supports:
AMD FirePro D300, D500, D700
AMD Radeon 5770, 5870, 7970
Nvidia Quadro K5000
Nvidia Quadro 4000
Nvidia 650M and 750M

We base this list on which GPUs are working with the Houdini version at the time. Also, most other vendors have had a heck of a hard time getting their GL working compared to Windows/Linux. It's a pretty well-known fact that Apple's GL drivers are not very robust compared to the vendor-specific ones on Windows and Linux. They're much easier to break, and much harder to debug because Apple still hasn't implemented GL_KHR_debug like pretty much everyone else.

So forgive me my minor rant, this situation of limited GPU support on OS X really needs to be resolved. No more excuses regarding pals at Apple that promise they'll remedy the situation in the SP. If SideFX's competitors have solved the problem surely SideFX can solve it too.

We workaround as many driver bugs as possible on all platforms. There are about 4x more driver workarounds for OSX than any other platform or graphics vendor. Unfortunately there are some bugs that cannot be worked around and instead require the driver to be fixed. Selection on the early mobile AMD GPUs is one - the driver returns incorrect data along with valid pick IDs in the transform feedback buffer, and so the resulting selection is garbled. It's fine on later AMD mobile GPUs on OSX, and with the same GPUs on Windows. The only way to work around that would be to rewrite selection in software for that particular OS/hardware combination, and that is prohibitively expensive in terms of development time. If you consider that “blame” then that's fine, but to me it's just the technical reality of the situation.

It's also much easier to get a driver bug fixed in a timely manner by AMD and Nvidia than Apple. I don't know why that is (though I have my suspicions) but that's the way it is. I'm still waiting on the gl_FrontFacing bug on Intel GPUs to be fixed (submitted over a year ago, we've since worked around it), and AMD depth samples bug to be fixed (6 months now, worked around by disabling AA on AMD/OSX combos). AMD and Nvidia patches and releases their own drivers much faster, like 1-2 months.

Trust me - if I can workaround or fix problems myself, I do. It's much better than leaving it up to Apple, who seems to have very little interest and/or manpower to do so.

mandrake0
i have read somewhere that the houdini osx problem can be solved by sesi. the question is more is it worth it?

it's a huge task to solve the vendors driver bugs i mean in worst case a full time developer has to make solutions for fixing driver platform specified problems.

Perhaps the post was referring to working around broken parts of the driver. We do that a lot.

And you're correct, debugging driver bugs is quite time consuming because a) you're not actually sure it's a driver bug until you've debugged the hell out of your own code, and b) you have to figure out what'll actually fix the problem. Sometimes it's moving code around in a GLSL shader, sometimes it's disabling the feature, sometimes it's a change that's incredibly bizarre that makes no sense. And very often b) is trial-and-error.

twod
Trust me - if I can workaround or fix problems myself, I do. It's much better than leaving it up to Apple, who seems to have very little interest and/or manpower to do so.

I feel a little guilty now about my rant, it had been a long day.

My problem I that I have to I deal with studio's from outside of FX that have warmed to the possibilities of Houdini mainly because of HE for Unity and UE (traditional design visualisation shops). Many of these studios are still OS X centric and tend to eke out hardware investments in 3-5 year cycles. Therefore many of them have just the sort of hardware that has problems with Houdini (custom build i7 iMac's 2012-2014).

I totally get you're doing everything you can. It's just a bitter pill to swallow when Modo, Maya and C4D manage to find a workable solution to Apples shoddy GL drivers.

Let's just hope that the powers that be at Apple wake up to the fact that ‘pro users’ were half the reason that consumers wanted to buy Apple in the first place and return to providing decent pro solutions once again.

Sadly, I think we may be in for a long wait…

Jonathan Moore2
I totally get you're doing everything you can. It's just a bitter pill to swallow when Modo, Maya and C4D manage to find a workable solution to Apples shoddy GL drivers.

Let's just hope that the powers that be at Apple wake up to the fact that ‘pro users’ were half the reason that consumers wanted to buy Apple in the first place and return to providing decent pro solutions once again.

Sadly, I think we may be in for a long wait…

It is pretty frustrating, no argument there. I can't say why the other apps don't have these issues as I don't know how they're implementing things. Houdini uses GL to draw its entire interface, not just the viewport, so that's at least one important difference, and core-GL3 is likely another big one.

We took the action of adjusting the Supported Mac Graphics to help users manage expectations when it comes to OSX & Houdini. Beyond fixing problems, it felt like the most reasonable thing to do.