i'm fairly new to houdini.
i had houdini apprentice 5.5, 6, and now 6.1.
it seems with all of these houdini is quite unstable, it crashes very often, and the feedback is rarely real-time. i am running a p4 1.8 with 768 megs of ddr333 win xp and a radeon 8500 128 meg video card.
i am a lightwave and motionbuilder and digital fusion user….with all of these the performance is great on this computer…but with houdini it runs terrible. i thought that with each new version the problem would go away but it didn't.

i'm not trying to run down the software, i'm just wondering if anyone else has experienced these problems…….perhaps it is the video card?
i run the latest drivers (usually)…what version of openGL or directX works best with houdini?

not knowing what you're trying to do in Houdini makes it hard to judge what kind of performance you can expect to see…
but in this case I'd say it's the radeon…do a search here for posts about ATI cards and you'll find lots of people who have had not so great times with radeons…some might have some suggestions for you…
HTH

It is definately Radeon!
I have the same card.
Try and set HOUDINI_OGL_SOFTWARE variable in Windows. Set it's value to 1. This will force Houdini to use software OpenGL rendering instead
of your videocard. Certanly, you will loose some prformance but at least
Houdini will become way more stable.

Cheers.

i loaded in the latest driver and it did help….
guess i'll have to look at a Nvidia