Rubick

edward
Are you running KDE? If you are, try uninstalling KDE Connect.

Nope, currently running Ubuntu 16.04 with default Unity environment.

After an apt-get dist-upgrade, glxinfo is showing max supported opengl version as 4.4 too.

edward
Did you try switching back to DRI 2?

Didn't help.

I noticed that Houdini's “About” menu shows my amount of vram as “unknown” even if I specify the amount in 20-intel.conf. Could that be part of the issue? Intel GPU's are supposed to dynamically allocate video ram as need. Perhaps it isn't working correctly with Houdini.

*edit-update*
-No luck with daily build v627.
-Works fine under Windows 10, which also shows “unknown” amount of vram.
-About menu shows OpenGL version as 4.4 in Win 10, but 3.3 in ubuntu 16.04

I had the same issue trying to get Houdini v607 to run on Intel's Skull Canyon NUC, which has an i7-6770HQ cpu and iris 580 gpu. I can get past the splash screen, but Houdini hangs for about 10 seconds before crashing when I create any object in the viewport. Sometimes I can create a couple before it hangs. Same issue in Ubuntu 16.04 and a few other distros.

I've tried various combinations of the following env variables:

HOUDINI_OGL_MAX_GL_VERSION
HOUDINI_OGL_CORE_PROFILE
HOUDINI_EXPERIMENTAL

I've also tried newer drivers from https://01.org/linuxgraphics, [01.org] and changing settings in 20-intel.conf (see https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/intel_graphics). [wiki.archlinux.org]

Any ideas?