I've been testing several packages (Maya, Blender, Cinema 4D and Houdini) to see how they animate when a rigged character model is subdivided. With normal subdivision, most manage 1 level without flinching; at 2 some crawl, and at 3 most crawl. Maya is the definitely the fastest. When I change the subdivision to OpenSubDiv, which use the GPU, all the packages just power though… Cinema 4D and Blender were managing over 60fps at subdivision level 3. But poor Houdini… it just crawls, even at subdivision level 1.

My question is this… does Houdini accelerate it's OpenSubDiv with the GPU, and if so, why is it still so sluggish? Is there anyway to improve the speed and give the same sort of frame rates the other packages seem to be able to achieve? Houdini is such a wonderful package but unless you animate at 25 fps, it's never going to suitable for character animation.

Houdini doesn't use GPU-accelerated OpenSubDiv. We used to a few versions back, but when we upgraded to OSD 3.0, their GLSL shaders were reworked and haven't been integrated into Houdini.