I am planning on buying one of the hopefully real and soon announced m1x/m2 Mac minis for light to medium home office kind of work.
Not for heavy duty render stuff but for developing Houdini assets for Unreal, some Simulation work like Vellum or RBD, PDG etc.

So my question is how is the current state running 18.5 on Apple Silicon.
Are there things that don't work at all?
Is it generally usable?

I can't say that I have done a lot of heavily advanced things on my Mac Book Air M1, but Houdini does seem to work fine under Rosetta. I think someone mentioned some issues with Heightfields a while back, but they do seem to work fine for me so I'm not sure what that was all about.

I do hope that SideFX will release an ARM build of Houdini like Blender has, but in the meantime it is running fine under Rosetta.

Thanks for your reply!
As long as there are no showstoppers I'll be fine until SideFX does release an ARM Version of Houdini.

Can you say something about the performance in general or specifically with vellum for example?

I am long overdue from making a Houdini Intel vs. ARM comparison for my channel and I should probably tackle it since there is obviously interest in it. Stay tuned, I'll try to make one before the end of this week.

Midphase
I am long overdue from making a Houdini Intel vs. ARM comparison for my channel and I should probably tackle it since there is obviously interest in it. Stay tuned, I'll try to make one before the end of this week.

seeing houdini on arm in action would be awesome

Just watch out if you need to run Houdini Engine under Mac. HDAs which work flawlessly under Windows won't run at all under Mac.

Houdini itself seems to have no problems, but the Engine... that's a different matter.

With today's announcement from Apple of the M1 Pro and especially the M1 Max, these new chips should make for an incredible Houdini experience on the new MacBook Pro machines. 64GB of shared video memory along with 32 GPU cores, I really look forward to seeing an M1-native version of Houdini!

With the todays release of monster M1max Apple silicon i can't wait for ARM version of Houdini
Imagine what SOC's they bring to the iMac's and Mac pro's !
Mac's made a second huge step into PC territory and i wish SideFX will not ignore that and Houdini will be
ready for that revolution )

IceBar0n
With the todays release of monster M1max Apple silicon i can't wait for ARM version of Houdini
Imagine what SOC's they bring to the iMac's and Mac pro's !
Mac's made a second huge step into PC territory and i wish SideFX will not ignore that and Houdini will be
ready for that revolution )

wondering why they haven't said anything official concerning apple silicon..
some kind of roadmap would be great
hopefully they are working on it and it will be released within a year

Seems HF has been fixed now on AS! That is great. Was problematic before. ( If I remember correctly it had to do with AS GPU support for some specific feature, maybe geometry shaders).

I wonder if there is anything new in H19 for Macs? I saw that the viewport supports EDR values now so that is cool but haven't seen/heard anything else

curiously enough same day H19 launch reveal:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTfmtiz9qSI [www.youtube.com]
Scott Keating, Senior Product designer in R&D
around 4:18 he present some of the new exiting features in Solaris
on a Mac...I hope is a sign they are planning on porting it over m1 pro and max.

Condor
around 4:18 he present some of the new exiting features in Solaris
on a Mac...I hope is a sign they are planning on porting it over m1 pro and max.

Hmmm did not see any signs of Mac OS at 4:18 time,
i think Scott simply run presentation video files from Macbook ?
Or i'm blind hehe

Midphase
I am long overdue from making a Houdini Intel vs. ARM comparison for my channel and I should probably tackle it since there is obviously interest in it. Stay tuned, I'll try to make one before the end of this week.

waiting for the video

The system requirements of 19 state this: “Note: on an M1 mac it is NOT supported natively yet. You can run via Rosetta and therefore the performance won't be as good as it will be once native support is added.”

I guess we can interpret this that native support is being worked on.

joostkonemann
I guess we can interpret this that native support is being worked on.

I guess so too.
An official statement about what we can expect (eg. xpu/metal support) would be great though.

chf

Thank you very much! My experience was similar, rendering times more or less on par with the Ryzen 5900HS, maybe a few percent slower.
I had big problems with the viewport though, everything was really sluggish - did you have the same problems or did you find any solution for that?

How is it possible that Blender foundation can transition so quickly and Sidefx can't.

https://youtu.be/ybXPYjh0FKU?t=181 [youtu.be]

Was Craig mistaken? He said most apps can be updated in days, even if he is painting an overly rosy picture and it takes weeks or worse a month or two, we should have a native apple silicon version of Houdini a full year later.

Maybe Houdini is over complex, but Blender is beginning to do things that Houdini can do, it's free, and is already runs native.

I need to dedicate more time to Blender, it's crazy to me the things those guys can accomplish.

strangedays
How is it possible that Blender foundation can transition so quickly and Sidefx can't.

Apple is an investor in the Blender foundation. They could have put dozens of engineers on the task.

strangedays
Was Craig mistaken? He said most apps can be updated in days, even if he is painting an overly rosy picture and it takes weeks or worse a month or two, we should have a native apple silicon version of Houdini a full year later.

If an app depends on libraries that aren't native, then it may as well take an infinite amount of time to transition to native code.

in any case.. Since Apple decided on it's future with his own processors, I assume that the ARM support is just the question of time.