Are there any particular preferences I can tweak for better redraws on my laptop? The laptop is running at 1920x1200 with an ATI Radeon Mobility 9700 - the card only has 64MB ram though. Redraw speeds are slow enough that something seems pretty off.

Try installing the Catalyst driver ver. 4.11. This seemed to speed things up a bit over older drivers and was more stable with Houdini as well. I haven't tried the new 5.x drivers yet, but you could try that too.

try setting an environment variable HOUDINI_OGL_SOFTWARE to 1.

it totally fixed my ATI problems.

credit to edward (i think

Yah, but that's going to completely disable the opengl usage of the graphics card, isn't it? Sort of the point of getting a 3D card in the first place…

Cheers,

J.C.

I tried the Catalyst 5.1 drivers and they seem pretty good as well. The only redraw problems I noticed were slow redraws on Parm Dialogs the first time you display a node of that type.

This is a far cry from the earlier Catalyst drivers, which were slow and unstable with Houdini.

Incidently, I'm using a Radeon 9800 Pro 128Mb, so my performance will likely be better than a 9700 (one step ahead generation-wise) and a mobility chip (which is clocked lower).

Yah, but that's going to completely disable the opengl usage of the graphics card, isn't it? Sort of the point of getting a 3D card in the first place…

Yes, that env variable is definitely a last ditch punt. Use it only if nothing else works (driver updates, other OGL env variables, etc)

In my defense, I mentioned that environment variable for ATI Rage 128.
( http://www.sidefx.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=15 [sidefx.com] ) I'm almost sure you can mostly count out 3D acceleration on such old cards anyhow.