I think a lot of Mac users (me for sure) would really appreciate it if SideFX could come with an official statement regarding Apple Silicon support in future Houdini versions.

People need to plan ahead regarding hardware investments...

joostkonemann
I think a lot of Mac users (me for sure) would really appreciate it if SideFX could come with an official statement regarding Apple Silicon support in future Houdini versions.

People need to plan ahead regarding hardware investments...

Just adding my voice to this. Any communication regarding future support for Apple hardware is much appreciated.

I will add another request for this. Although Houdini does run on Rosetta, it would be helpful to know if an upcoming ARM version is in the works.

Rosetta may be a solution right now, but Rosetta won’t have infinite life, just like with the PowerPC to Intel transition.

Another voice to the discussion... most of us do hardware investments for the long run and so any word about long term native support for Apple Silicon on Houdini would be greatly appreciated

Only if the earnings generated by Apple users can foot the bill for this operation

Wow, this thread was being so nice and pleasant that I was starting to wonder how long it would take before the first snide post would pop up. Turns out the answer is slightly less than 48 hours!

I guess SideFX knows quite well how large the Mac user base of Houdini is. So a year after the announcement of the transition, and more than 6 months after the first release of an AS Mac, they should be able to tell their users something about future support… Maybe the answer is that macOS will not be supported after Rosetta stops, for whatever reason. Of course not the answer I’m hoping for, but better than being kept in the dark.

I’ve sent an email to supports as well, let’s just wait if someone can reveal some info.

SideFX and Apple have an established relationship as evidenced by frequent mentions of Houdini in Apple WWDC presentations, as well as Apple's prominent use of Houdini in its marketing campaign for the iMac Pro. If the numbers are similar to Blender's user base, then the MacOS users should account for roughly 10-15% of the total Houdini user base (with Linux users making up another 15-20% and Windows for the rest).

The more important question is whether ARM/m1x SOC designs will outperform existing Intel and AMD capabilities to provide a compelling and more cost effective solution, and hence increase the user base in the future.

For instance, think about the fact that ARM SOC's consume a fraction of electricity as their Intel and AMD counterparts. For the casual home user, this might not be a particularly compelling factor; but for a small VFX studio with render farms whose energy consumption is in the many thousands of dollars each month, switching to ARM based MacOS machines might be a better and more cost effective option.

SideFX strikes me as a pretty forward thinking company, and my guess is that they're not just evaluating the current market, but also what their client base could be in 3-5 years. I am confident that an Houdini ARM port already exists, and I suspect that such an announcement might come along with a Houdini 19 press event.

Totally agree with your thoughts on this, so I do have good hopes. But I don’t like to make decisions on good hopes only :/

Midphase
Wow, this thread was being so nice and pleasant that I was starting to wonder how long it would take before the first snide post would pop up. Turns out the answer is slightly less than 48 hours!

Ohh come on! That was far from a snide post. I just wanted to give a bit of counter argument to the idea. If sidefx thinks the investment/return on this is good then I'm all for it.

That's the thing though....what is a good investment? There are so many elements to Houdini that one could make the same argument about anything that gets asked about in these forums such as updating COPs, putting more development into Karma GPU, optimizing UV tools, etc.

We all ask for things that are important to us, and it's equally important for SideFX to be aware of what users are interested in. If not here then where? Submitting a feature request ticket is an isolated task that isn't likely to yield any real data as to how many people would be interested in a particular feature. I would also say that the percentage of Houdini users who actually ever bother to submit a feature request ticket are a tiny minority.

Lastly, I am 99.9999% sure that SideFX can figure out its own financials and investment returns without someone stating the obvious.

Anyhoo, I get that your post was said in jest, but you should know that the subject is a bit touchy for Apple users since we typically get all sorts of abuse from people who should kindly mind their own OS's! ;-)

Just adding that I am one of those Mac (forced to use PC/Linux!) that are hoping for a future. The only answer I got from sidefx was that M1 is not a supported platform for the time being. And since that question a few months ago there has been absolutely no progress in fixing even the most glaring bug regarding heightfields.... (No, HF doesn't work at all on M1)
so...Let's keep hoping. In the meantime, be sure to get one of those Intel Macs if you need to have H on Mac...

filipw
And since that question a few months ago there has been absolutely no progress in fixing even the most glaring bug regarding heightfields.... (No, HF doesn't work at all on M1)

Let's hope this means they are working on a native build instead of fixing it to run with Rosetta...

Didn't receive any response on my email to support, not even "We can't say anything about it." or "Not supported currently.". A bit disappointing...

I feel part of this group of Mac users who is hoping to get what I would consider a deserved response from SideFx.
Future investment argument seems rational and sensitive to me too, regardless of your particular inclination for a hardware platform and given what it seems to be a descent technological resurge with the new Silicon ships for what we can see in some public analyst report on the increase of sales, still long way to go. Feels to me also an interesting point. Thoughts?

I'm interested in this also, however as a former FX TD now in CS education, I think what people don't realize is switching to a completely different architecture is a big dev task for a relatively small subset of users. It's not as simple as just re-compiling the Houdini codebase for a different instruction set, ARM is a reduced instruction set and has different inner workings than x86/64, to get the best possible performance we know SideFX strive for, it would be a lot of work to tune and port existing code to run in a performant manner.

Not to mention the large amount of third party dependences some of which may not be open source and thus SideFX relies on those vendors porting and re-building their code to run on Arm64, the ones that are open source may need work to run as well on ARM as they could on x86-64, we as an industry have never really needed to think about building tools that run on ARM.

Then we have the issue of the M1 GPU, Apple deprecated OpenGL and OpenCL in favour of pushing their Metal API which is no doubt a good choice in the long run to maximize the throughput of their hardware, but for an industry whose tools for Hardware Rendering(eg Viewport) are currently heavily reliant on OpenGL (an older Graphics API) this would mean either writing a new back-end of the Houdini Viewport to run natively on Metal, or using translation frameworks such as MoltenVK with a Vulkan backend, that could run cross-platform, both big tasks in themselves and while there's no doubt the viewport utilizing the Vulkan API could have significant performance benefits, those benefits have a work to benefit ratio than is lower than it may seem. However I do belive current MacOS support does use an older OpenGL standard, but there is no guarantee how long this will be supported due to the deprecation.

With all that in mind, we should be grateful Houdini as is runs pretty well using Rosetta 2 !
Saying that, what Apple have done with the M1 Mac is really great and it set's up a exciting future, so in the long run it would be really cool to see a native M1 / Arm based Houdini binary from SideFX. Also some Linux distros (Ubuntu, Fedora etc.) are able to run on Arm and there is significant interest in reverse-engineering the M1 Chip to be able to run Linux, which may add more users and maybe even more interest in a native M1 Houdini binary.

Disclaimer - This is educated speculation and I do not work for SideFX (sadly !)

niallhornvfx
With all that in mind, we should be grateful Houdini as it runs pretty well using Rosetta 2!

We may be grateful at the moment, but Rosetta will not stay in macOS forever. And as customers of SideFX, we should expect to be informed about future support on an OS that is currently supported.

Hopefully, SideFX has some news around Siggraph...?!

I think I said this before, but if Apple can offer a compelling reason why their hardware is a superior choice and has a superior cost/performance ratio than non-ARM offerings, then MacOS support with see a renaissance like no other.

Not even talking about up-front cost but rather cost-over-life which is a substantial consideration for large enterprises. The ability for instance for a render farm to run a more powerful operation at a fraction of the energy costs is likely what Apple is banking on when it comes to enterprise adoption.

The current initial crop of ARM machines offers a slight incentive to some users, but it has not yet offered a compelling reason for higher end users to switch. If/when Apple finally offers a selection of "pro" ARM machines that can address the needs of users seeking substantially higher computational power, that's when the shift from the 3rd party developers will likely happen.

We'll see what is released next, rumor has it that 16" Mac Book Pros with 16 performance cores and as many as 32 GPU units are less than two months away.

a port isn't easy but when it will be happen then i am sure we can see the requirements on the https://vfxplatform.com/ [vfxplatform.com]
sidefx can't do these task alone there is so many code that is not native.

i am sure there will be sooner or later a statement coming from SESI maybe when H19 is out or H19.5 we just need to wait.

I would be careful about considering Apple computers. My 2019 Mac pro was purchased February 2020 and so far required replacement of defective parts: keyboard, logic board, graphics card, and I/O controller.

Not to mention they "accidentally" overcharged by $1000 the first time and lost the first shipment between the Apple factory and FedEx.