hey i tried the utah teapot in H13 and for some reason it is very slow to move around the viewport as if it was millions of polygons.

The teapot is made up of 33 bezier surfaces. If you copy it without packing, it can be rather slow as the surfaces are drawn individually. I don't have any issue with just one being displayed, though.

Double-check the LOD value in the viewport display options. Make sure that it's not set to an enormously high value. I think the default is 1.0.

I might have expressed myself uncorrectly, i mean that the viewport speed is fine, but moving the pot around the viewport is very slow

Level of detail is set to 1…at any LOD i get the same response
even at 0.1 it is still very slow

anyway i did an FPS check

open scene drop a utah pot and a sphere
when i move the sphere i get 130 FPS
when i move the pot i get 7 FPS

i do nothing except dropping the node.

weird

Again (and following from the two previous responses above) it's the rendering of the bezier surfaces in OpenGL that is the issue. The bezier patches are triangulated in the graphics card. Depending on the LOD set in the viewport display options, it can be quite excessive. By default the LOD is 1 but setting this to say 0.1 or 0.01 can improve performance dramatically = less polygons.
Some low-end graphics cards may do this conversion in software as most games don't use bezier patches and there are only so many OpenGL operations that can be performed in hardware.

On the other hand, if you convert the teapot to say polysoup type primitives, then you control the tessellation of the bezier patches yourself, and there you go.

thanks for answering.
But i have a gtx titan and the issue doesn't happen in h12.5

it is actually twice as fast in 12,5

also noticed that moving the node itself is very slow, while moving the context of the node is very fast.

anyway it is just something i noticed , not a big deal,
i was just surprised at the performance

The LOD display option is in the Display Options dialog Geometry tab. It should be set to 1.

If you're transforming the sphere & teapot at the object level, then both are exceedingly fast for me in 12.5 and 13.

If you're using a Transform SOP, then you're comparing the fastest primitive in Houdini with one of the slowest. The Primitive Sphere has exactly one point at the center, and this is being transformed. Since spheres have the same shape, only 1 sphere is ever created and it's just transformed with a 4x4 matrix.

Bezier surfaces, on the other hand, require re-tessellation when the points are transformed, which is a relatively heavy operation. And the teapot does this 33x. However, I get roughly the same performance in 12.5 and 13, 30ms to update and draw.

Also, make sure you have the Show Time in 12.5 set to Frame Time and not Graphics Draw, as the later only reports draw time, not SOP cook and tessellation time. H13 only has a toggle for Show Time, as it determines which one to report based on context.

thanks for answering everyone