For artists using Houdini as their daily tool for everything (from modeling to final renders), how has the stability of the application been for you?

I love houdini, it's the best DCC I've used, but things like viewport states for node and such just aren't working properly for me. It's really bad, especially when modeling sometimes I have say a polysplit node and I cant select any geometry components, so I have to manually put down an edit sop to start selecting components again. Lots more errors with all sorts of nodes and viewport states, edit and uv edit SOPS gets placed at random locations in the graph and messes the your model up if you're not paying attention and so forth.

The openGL is the worst I've ever come across. Lots of times I have to close the scene viewer and open a new one for the openGL to show correct data.

Now I'm using SOP Networks inside of LOPS all the time so I'm really not sure if that could be the issue.

LOPS in general crashes the software quite frequently (I have redshift installed) so don't know what role that plays.

So, I'm curious If I'm the only one with these issues or others have these issues as well or maybe tips as to what might be causing these instabilities.

system setup is:

Houdini 19.5.569
ryzen 3950x
64GB RAM
RTX 3090

Hey. Frustrating is it might be, i'd say ... "it is not so bad".
quick tip: There's a "Reset Viewport" in the Labs dropdown to reset viewport. Handy. But goes to show that the viewport bug is a known thing since even Labs team created this button, hehe.

I remember a simple bevel destroying whole project to the point of no reload, had to reload an incremental autosave before i did the bevel, otherwise it would instacrash on load. Haven't had this problem for a while, so seems to be fixed. Recently I am sometimes having segfaults trying to subd+crease geometry coming out of exoside quadremesher. Waiting for native quad remesher in H20 here

In all seriousness, the biggest dealbreaker recently is becoming the actual OS and drivers. From bad scheduler of CPU cores to new nVidia drivers that create new problems (XPU Optix fail is an example).. this just never ends. There are many threads on UE forums about the "d3d device removed" bug which crashes the engine all the time. The newer the drivers, the more frequent crashes appear to be. I have this bug myself (well, i guess everyone does) and I happen to have a project(s) where doing some simple camera movements will crash it with a 100% probability. Copying a Niagara module was a recipe for a crash as well, seems to be okay~ish now, but i never fail to press "Save all" hotkeys because i've learned my lesson well.

So.. yes, it sometimes crashes, yes there are viewport bugs, yet all in all i'd call it comparatively stable. That's just my experience.

Anything editing/interactive/Solaris is super flaky for me. I crash/freeze multiple times a day and get "fake" viewport geo.

@SideFX team, please don't let this be a persistent problem, the time of crashing and restarting (sometimes I have to restart the license server as well) really adds up. I get that software will crash from time to time, but it crashes quite often with the current production version of Houdini. The viewport thing seems to have been really bad for years because I watched tutorials done using Houdini 13 and the presenter was complaining about crappy viewport. It would be great if the mentioned vulkan viewport comes in the next major release (fingers crossed). Although, that too might be quite buggy upon initial release. Solaris might still be wonky but nothing compared to when it was first released, it has gotten much better but still needs quite a bit of work.