I am planning to get latest MacBookPro with Retina. Does anyone have experience how it behaves with Houdini?

Also what is highest OpenGL you can get with Mac on Nvidia GT650M ?

The GL2.1 renderer is the highest supported renderer under OSX in Houdini due to Apple's drivers. If you were to dual boot the MacBook Pro to Windows or Linux, you could run the GL3.2 renderer (using Nvidia's drivers).

I might consider installing Linux beside Osx than. How large are performance differences between 2.1 and 3.2 ?

Geometry updates are a bit slower in GL2.1, especially if the geometry contains primitive or vertex attributes that the shader uses (N, uv, Cd, Alpha). Point instancing is also slower because it cannot use GL3 instancing. Tumbling can be faster on some models in GL2 once the update has completed, due to the lack of a geometry shader in certain cases (prim/vert attribs, wire-over shading).

Edit: Oh, and I should add that Apple's GL drivers do exhibit worse performance than the same hardware running Nvidia's proprietary driver on Linux or Windows. It's been awhile since I did an Apples-to-apples comparison, though.

What do you guys suggest about Linux distribution?

I was looking at Ubuntu for that a while back as it seemed to be the most compatible (also due to my lack of experience tweaking things manually in linux).
Check this page out:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MacBookPro [help.ubuntu.com]

There's a compatibility list near the end

Cheers

twod
Geometry updates are a bit slower in GL2.1, especially if the geometry contains primitive or vertex attributes that the shader uses (N, uv, Cd, Alpha). Point instancing is also slower because it cannot use GL3 instancing. Tumbling can be faster on some models in GL2 once the update has completed, due to the lack of a geometry shader in certain cases (prim/vert attribs, wire-over shading).

Edit: Oh, and I should add that Apple's GL drivers do exhibit worse performance than the same hardware running Nvidia's proprietary driver on Linux or Windows. It's been awhile since I did an Apples-to-apples comparison, though.

Hello!
Is there any chance that it will be possible to use GL3.3 (or GL4.1) on MBP in Houdini future versions?
Painting weights is painfull now… I'm on MBP (mid 2014) with i7 2,5 GHz

Is there any chance that it will be possible to use GL3.3 (or GL4.1) on MBP in Houdini future versions?

Yes. The next Houdini release has a single viewport renderer based on GL3.3 for all platforms.