Hi - I'll be updating my entire hardware setup soon. Thinking making Houdini a bigger part of my work. I have to stay with MacOS at this point.. I wondering what some of the better hardware options are from a Houdini point of view.
My focus would be better and more responsive interactions with modeling, animating and lighting (rather than increasing rendering, encoding times).
Would the iMac Retina 5K with the 3.6GHz Intel Core i9 would be more suitable than (or even equal performance to) the Mac Pro with the 3.5GHz Intel Xeon W? Would the low processor speeds of the iMac Pro mean that it's actually not the better option for 3D work?
What is the state of GPU rending in Houdini? Would any of these cards limit future potential to take advantage of what seems to be a feature growing in importance and popularity?
At this stage, you should only use a ‘Supported OSX Graphics Cards’ which at the moment is AMD Radeon Pro Vega 64. Support actively rejects bug submissions based on systems with non-supported graphics cards.
Apart from that:
Animation is a CPU/GPU thing but is bounded by some QT issues on Mac, i.e. dragging something in the viewport refreshes the UI in a manner that is very slow. You need to close some of the parameters/Network views windows to ameliorate the slowdowns.
Modelling is a combination of GPU and CPU but some ops are single-threaded so you want a high turbo speed.
Lighting is rendering, so overall more total GHz helps but consider that Mantra didn't show any improvements on 32 core Threadrippers vs 16 core ones on Windows IIRC. Karma may not have this limitation.
Perhaps H18 fixes some of these issues but nothing has been announced in this area.
art3mis, with all due respect, why is it that when someone asks an OSX-related question, there always has to be someone else chiming in about how they should switch to Windows or Linux instead?
Believe me, there is not a single OSX user out there who hasn't heard what you said a million times before. For us, it's a way of life so please be courteous and don't continue to beat us over the head with it.
The reality is that for some of us, Linux or Windows is not an option because we rely on other OSX-centric apps for everything else that we do. For instance, I use AfterEffects quite a bit, so right there Linux is not an option. I also use Logic Pro X, so Windows is not an option either.
So.. not supported means: 1. you just won't get the performance you paid for? or 2. you're likely to experience frequent hangs/crashes? or 3. both? or 4. no one can really say as they've just not been tested properly?
Goat, I'm not trying to be an Apple or a SideFX apologist here, but for the record we're talking about submitting bugs, and not necessarily whether or not Houdini runs well in OSX.
For me, Houdini 17.5 runs quite well in OSX, and my system is most definitely not supported officially.
Rather, I think a better strategy would be to contact support and ask them to qualify the new Mac Book Pros as soon as possible since there is not a reason in the world why they shouldn't be supported, as well as Catalina which is going to come pre-installed on pretty much any Mac.
Midphase Goat, I'm not trying to be an Apple or a SideFX apologist here, but for the record we're talking about submitting bugs, and not necessarily whether or not Houdini runs well in OSX.
Bugs are dysfunctions that affects whether it runs well. Can't submit, can't fix.
There are elements of your question worth further discussion. I use Houdini and Davinci Resolve, both of which are demanding of graphics hardware. My compromise (i.e. the sweet spot) was the 10-core iMac Pro (refurbished). This works well enough, with the following caveats: - I bought the 8g Vega 64. If I could I would have purchased the 16g Vega - the 10 core model boost speed is not sufficient for some plugins, so I use external GPUs and DSP. In this case 2 eGPUs for video and a wavesgrid server for music plugins
The relevant ideas: - Houdini uses the built in Vega 64 and an external radeon vii eGPU with 16g vram for openCL. I am content with the performance. Off topic but resolve uses all 3 GPUs and my use case is 4K proxies and matchmoving. - 10 cores seemed like a good idea, but the Xeons are not so competitive with fewer threads.
What would I do differently? - in my case the xeon single processor performance actually prevents my using acustica plugins (for example), and there definitely other apps where an i9 may be better. - As above, I’d get the 16g Vega. This addresses a concern that some apps only use the amount of vram available to the card with the least onboard.
As with many people here, I am just waiting for a modular Mac Pro… and spending as little as possible except on GPUs and DSPs which can be used with that next machine.
