H22 viewport black screen fix with unsupported onboard GPU

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I have an old Dell computer with a onboard Intel HD 630 GPU.
When I installed H22.0.368 the /obj sceneview viewport was black.
The /stage viewport was also black.
My windows10 desktop hardware does not support Vulkan.

The fix was found thanks to Google Gemini search(I'm not sure who posted this fix but thank you).
Unfortunately you don't get the major enhancements available with Vulkan but I get to try the H22 features.

Find and edit the houdini.env file in my case the path C:\Users\YOUR_USERNAME\Documents\houdini22.0\houdini.env

Add this line to houdini.env and restart H22

HOUDINI_VULKAN_VIEWER = 0

I know there is a plan to deprecate OpenGL so this approach may eventually not work.
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I'm not sure how that's working for you in H22, as Vulkan is the only renderer and HOUDINI_VULKAN_VIEWER has no effect, but this will work for H21.
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malexander
I'm not sure how that's working for you in H22, as Vulkan is the only renderer and HOUDINI_VULKAN_VIEWER has no effect, but this will work for H21.

I'm running H22.0.368 and it is working on my ancient hardware probably because environment variable HOUDINI_VULKAN_VIEWER is set to 0.
The scene viewport works in /obj as well as /stage/lopnet.
Perhaps the legacy opengl code is still in-place in this build.

In any case its great that its working because I've wanting to try the new H22 features.
Image Not Found


I'm adding a snapshot of the /stage scene view which indicates opengl in the bottom right corner.
Edited by willanielewicz - July 31, 2026 20:29:39

Attachments:
viewport_capture2.JPG (271.3 KB)

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