Hello,
Reading the list of supported Mac Graphics Cards below, I don't see any of the cards of MacBookPro (AMD Radeon R9 M370X) and iMac Retina 5k (AMD Radeon R9 M395) and iMac Retina 4K (Intel Iris Pro Graphics 6200).
:?
Does that mean that none of the latest Macs would run Houdini smoothly ?
I'd like to buy an iMac (preferably, or MacBookPro) for video/photo mainly but with the possibility to experiment in Houdini as well.
Thanks for the help!

That is the list by Sidefx
AMD FirePro D300, D500, D700
AMD Radeon 5770
AMD Radeon 5870
AMD Radeon 7970

Nvidia Quadro K5000
Nvidia Quadro 4000
Nvidia 650M and 750M

Intel cards are not supported on the Mac -> looks like iMac 4k is totally out of the question

It just means that they need to update their testbed hardware to be more up-to-date. Houdini runs fine on iMacs and MacBook Pro

I'm running H15.0.278 on an iMac 5k Radeon R9 M295X in El Capitan 10.11.1.

The viewport is VERY slow, it becomes unusable for 300k> point models - timer and beach ball cursors when wanting to do anything.

I get crashes daily and all I'm doing is creating procedural terrain. One gets in the habit of CMD-S on every change made.

With the fixes made in the daily 15.0.274 build Houdini is usable on my iMac. The older versions it was a disaster.

Apparently the problems on the unsupported Macs are due to Apples home grown OpenGL drivers which are super buggy, and not the fault of the Houdini dev team. Perhaps some fixes will be present in Apples next dot update.

Due to severe crashing issues with the mobile Radeons in the iMac and MBP, we've removed them from our recommendation list. We've been in contact with AMD about this and it may be fixed for OSX 10.10.2. There was a workaround added to build 274 that removes multisampling from all AMD hardware which improves stability quite a bit. But we still can't really recommend them yet.

Twod, has AMD fixed their drivers for OSX El Capitan 10.11.2 yet?

If so, have you enabled multisampling in any of the H15 builds?

AMD has fixed one issue in 10.11.1 that caused massive instability with Houdini with the newer AMD mobile GPUs (eg M295X), but the multisampling bug still stands. I have a contact on the AMD OSX driver team and I'll check with them on that issue when 10.11.3 is nearing release, but so far haven't heard anything from him about it.

I have been using Houdini on Late 2015 iMac with M395X and haven't run into any issues yet. However I did not do an extensive test but only did some simple shading and lighting tests so far.

Thanks for that twod. Looking forward to AMD fixing this.