I'm considering buying a Microsoft Surface Pro 4 and am wondering if it will hand Houdini ok?
It wouldn't be for any heavy lifting, more just doing tutorials and exploring and so on. Anyone got any experience with this?

Thanks

I would recommend surfacebook because it has nvidia graphics.

Whatever system you're thinking about buying for use with Houdini, you should check it against our System Requirements and Supported Graphics Cards pages before you buy:

http://www.sidefx.com/sysreq [sidefx.com]

http://www.sidefx.com/Support/system-requirements/supported-graphics-cards/ [sidefx.com]

To answer your specific question about the Surface Pro 4, I've never tried it so I couldn't tell you for sure. If you get one with at least 8GB of RAM it should be ok for light usage, tutorials, exploration. Intel Iris graphics cards are supported but you want to make sure to get the latest drivers for them.

Good luck!

I have one with the Intel Iris graphics, and it works with a few things disabled in Houdini (such as HQ Lighting, antialiasing, and high-quality ghosted display). The high-res screen with integrated graphics can make it a bit sluggish at times, especially viewing large volumes or scenes.

Thanks for the responses.
Seems like the Surface Book maybe a good option. But

chrism
Whatever system you're thinking about buying for use with Houdini, you should check it against our System Requirements and Supported Graphics Cards pages before you buy:

http://www.sidefx.com/sysreq [sidefx.com]

http://www.sidefx.com/Support/system-requirements/supported-graphics-cards/ [sidefx.com]

To answer your specific question about the Surface Pro 4, I've never tried it so I couldn't tell you for sure. If you get one with at least 8GB of RAM it should be ok for light usage, tutorials, exploration. Intel Iris graphics cards are supported but you want to make sure to get the latest drivers for them.

Good luck!

Hey thanks. It seems like the Surface Book maybe a good option but it has a Nvidia GeForce 940M (from the Surfacebook wiki page [en.wikipedia.org]) which isn't supported.

I'm not too fluent in PC specs being a long time Mac user but I take it you wouldn't recommend this option? Or could it be just a matter of giving it a spin?

If all you're doing is tutorials then the 940M would probably be acceptable. We don't put GPUs on the recommended list that can't handle production-scale scenes, but lower-end cards of the same family/generation should work – just not with performance that we'd deem acceptable for production work.

Great. Thanks all.