Did anyone notice if their viewport performance in the latest H20.5 is much slower compared to preview versions?

With 50M points in the viewport H20.5 struggle while on H20 or H19 it is just almost real-time when you pan and orbit on the very same hardware.

Are there any new settings I should tweek to gain back those performances?

PS: this is the default Houdini viewport, not Vulkan.

I think we should just wait for some iterations.

Hey wanglifu,
Thank you for your reply.

Sure!
If I activate the viewport fps stats, the performances drop to less than half compared to H19 for example, and the more points I add the more drop I see.

AlexNardini1
PS: this is the default Houdini viewport, not Vulkan.

As of Houdini 20.5 the default viewport renderer is Vulkan. You can always switch back to OpenGL if you really needed to in the Preferences menu, under 3D viewport

Hi Tom,
thank you, that was it. it is now as fast as it once was

AlexNardini1
Did anyone notice if their viewport performance in the latest H20.5 is much slower compared to preview versions?

With 50M points in the viewport H20.5 struggle while on H20 or H19 it is just almost real-time when you pan and orbit on the very same hardware.

Are there any new settings I should tweek to gain back those performances?

PS: this is the default Houdini viewport, not Vulkan.

The performance is more or less the same with lights in the scene with gl in high quality lighting mode. Vulkan doesn't have 'normal lighting' mode so the pure headlight performance is about a 1/4 of what it was in gl.

Hello Jsmack,
Thank you for your reply and useful infos!

Over here,
with 50M colored points goes from ~20fps in GL to ~8fps in Vulkan.

If it can be useful, I have an RTX4090 with the latest studio drivers.

jsmack
The performance is more or less the same with lights in the scene with gl in high quality lighting mode. Vulkan doesn't have 'normal lighting' mode so the pure headlight performance is about a 1/4 of what it was in gl.

Sounds like a headache. No 'normal lighting' is okay, but I'd expect at least headlight-only to be fast.

AlexNardini1
Hello Jsmack,
Thank you for your reply and useful infos!

Over here,
with 50M colored points goes from ~20fps in GL to ~8fps in Vulkan.

If it can be useful, I have an RTX4090 with the latest studio drivers.

I didn't test a point cloud

The Vulkan render path also has some differences from the OpenGL path

There's a depth pre-pass that's there to improve performance in scenes with overdraw, but it can make geometry bottlenecks even worse, which is probably what's happening in a scene with 50 million points

Did SideFx say anywhere what the performance characteristics of the Vulkan viewport are compared to the OpenGl viewport?

In the keynote they state that it's finished, but I was hoping for at least something like a 1.5x speed improvement?

In the release notes, they mention

Threaded updates and rendering.

But what does that mean for real world performance?

What are other people experiencing?

Is it just me or does the new vulkan viewport not show VDB SDF surfaces by default? I don't know if there is a way to turn them on. Going to try going back to the openGL viewport.

Barrett Meeker
Is it just me or does the new vulkan viewport not show VDB SDF surfaces by default? I don't know if there is a way to turn them on. Going to try going back to the openGL viewport.

No it does show VDB surfaces as usual.

wyhinton1
What are other people experiencing?

My experience is that Vulkan viewport is way slower than OpenGL. About 60% slower.

I also seem to be affected by this. However I need to test more, so right now I'll file it under 'subjective'.
But one thing that struck me was the Houdini overall start up time. It now feels a tad slower than before.

I didn't expect this one, i thought Houdini viewport performance with realively heavy scene and texture or transparency to a weak admitted point of the package, with the previously announced Vulkan after 19.5 and now coming, i thought we coudl see some serious boost but certainly dropping half of the previous performance after this long wait.

What could we expect, what are advantage vulkan bring today on the table for us?

Is anyone experiencing image plane with transparency issues which does not show the transparency at all with Vulkan viewport?

Fedora 41
Nvidia drivers 565.57
kernel 6.11.5-300
Houdini 20.5 build 410