I am new to this forum. I have been downloading and watching all the Houdini videos available. H9 UI is cool!
I am really excited to start learning Houdini. I have a Macbook but since Houdini is not available in OS X, I am purchasing a Dell Inspiron 1520 with 8600MGT 256 MB VRAM and 2GB RAM. I want to know if Houdini will run on this laptop without major issues under Vista. Do I really need XP? Is the graphics card good enough to support H9? Do I need to buy a better laptop? (Desktop is not an option for me)
Hi there, I am not a geforce user but users in the forum say that 8xxx models have a driver problem which causes extremely slow fps in the opengl shaded modes. Workstation graphic cards are supported and recommended. Consumer cards are not supported anyway, however if you can not afford a quadro or firegl geforce users find the 7xxx series cards much more compatible and faster than 8xxx series with houdini. I would definetely recommend you the linux platform instead of vista, however if you insist using windoze, i recommend you stick with winxp until vista has better drivers.
mertyamak Hi there, I am not a geforce user but users in the forum say that 8xxx models have a driver problem which causes extremely slow fps in the opengl shaded modes..
OpenGL shaded modes are extremely fast, its when you turn on the display of points, point numbers, etc that causes a very low fps.
mertyamak Sorry for the misinformation, thanks for the correction.
No problem. The card really is awesome for games and such….but it sucks if you need to debug stuff in Houdini cause you can't display point numbers and the like.
The card is fine with up to a few thousand points displayed but once you get over 10k it starts to die.
With points option enabled the speed is ok, but with point numbers it is real slow, i couldn't figure out how to show fps though. Performance monitor shows values by ms.
So the real problem is with the drivers and not with the hardware? If thats the case, I can dual boot Ubuntu Linux for a while until the Windows drivers are corrected. How about Linux drivers? Are they good enough?
I get similar results with a GEforce 8800GTS on Windows (driver v158.22). Strange, since the point numbers are drawn with bitmap fonts, which you'd think would be fast. Perhaps the 8 series just dropped support for them.
Well, the 8800 is a radical departure from the hardware pipeline of all previous cards, and the driver is completely separate from the 7x00 series drivers, so I guess if they're going to clean house, now's the time to do it Or perhaps they just haven't made it to glBitmap() yet…
twod Well, the 8800 is a radical departure from the hardware pipeline of all previous cards, and the driver is completely separate from the 7x00 series drivers, so I guess if they're going to clean house, now's the time to do it Or perhaps they just haven't made it to glBitmap() yet…
Awww you brought logic to my perfectly constructed dig. :wink:
On a more seriously note, is this something that you (SESI) can work around? Or is there a more modern method? (Not for 9.0 but for some future release) I would have thought other people on the interwebs would have complained about glBitmap() if it was widely used. Google searches don't return much of anything.
I tried quickly switching the bitmap font for a texture mapped font, and it does look like it could be several times faster on the 8800 (winxp). However, the font appeared as large blocky gibberish, so it’s not a trivial change, and having it display correctly may impact the timing results I'm seeing (for good or ill).
On my 7800 card (linux), the speed was only slightly faster with textured fonts (but with the same gibberish - the font symbols look like old Atari 2600 alien ships. Amusing, but not terribly informative).
