well Ivé finally got my new computer rigged and I was thinking of testing houdini apprentice again.

Now when I look at system spec requirements I see something Ivé missed or something that has been altered recently.

It says No geforce cards only quadro cards, what´s wrong with the geforce cards, is it because of not properly certified drivers or what.

I had a quadro 1100 card before, but something was wrong with the card or the computer and I had to upgrade.

So I went for a zotac geforce gtx 480 card, did I make a mistake by buying wrong graphics card?

Michael

Consumer cards are not officially supported because they tend to be less stable than their professional counterparts. In general, consumer cards will work with Houdini, but often a bit slower than the equivalent pro hardware.

The hardware requirements have been updated for H11's release, but I believe the professional card requirement has been there for some time.

I use an 8800GTX, and it works fairly well, at least for my purposes anyways. A 480 is quite a step up from my 8800, so you should be fine with it.

I only start to get the viewport slowing down when I have a fairly large number of polys, a large number of fluid guides, or if I turn on the extra viewport displays such as point/primative numbers/normals, high quality lighting or shadows, viewport anti aliasing, anything above fairly small textures, ect, ect.
(my idea of “large” and “small” may differ from yours)

You can still do all those things, however you should expect more viewport lag when you move the view area than you would get from a new quadro. However, you'll also pay a whole lot more for a new quadro, so if a geforce works for your purposes, you saved yourself some money.

I have even used Houdini on Intel integrated cards. It is certainly possible, but it's slow, graphically glitchy, painful, and I certainly wouldn't recommend it.

And yes, the quadro requirement has been there since I started out with H9.5 as far as I know