Hi! I've got dual monitor system and I've recently installed windows 7 on it.
Before W 7 I had W vista and I haven't seen any errors in working of Houdini.

But Today, when I was making animation I saw that, when the main Houdini window is on my right monitor it runs a lot faster than on the left.
When I changed the monitors sockets (left -> right and right -> left) Houdini runs slow on THE SAME MONITOR as before.

(when I f.e. hit play button the slider on left monitor goes about 60 fps and on the left about 15 maybe 20 fps )

I don't understeand why it is so ….
The best thing is that, when I have houdini running in the monitor, in which it runs slow, and I focus any windows explorer window on this monitor, houdini starts to run as fast as on the second monitor!
Then when I focus again houdini it slows down.
I completly don't understeand it

Oh and one information more: left monitor (slow one) is 1680 x 1050 and right is 1280 x 1024, but as i mentioned above, the bigger monitor can run houdini as fast as the smaller when i focuse a system window

Has somebody saw such error before? What should I do to fix it?
Thank you.

I found the answer!
This is simply unpossible!
I've tested 6 monitors and found answer that when you're running not only houdini under windows 7 (maya, 3ds max etc) and you've got the wallpaper set to “lit color” (NOT BLACK) then this issue happens.
So you have to change the wallpaper color to lit black and then everything runs ok. :shock:
(This is new installation of windows 7 with good antivirus etc , so this has to be “normal issue” )

That is truly strange. Thank you for reporting it! Sounds like some sort of GPU optimization that can be done with black (like avoiding blending). Still, I wouldn't expect the desktop effect to have such a large impact on performance. Out of curiousity, what graphics card is in your system?

Hi!
I think, I solved the problem another way too - this way is far bether than this old one.
Previously I had in my system (windows 7) the desktop composition turned off.
When I turend it on (10 minutes ago ) everything started working fast and without problems!

So this is the best solution so far.
My graphic card is quadro 4600 - and the behavior was exactly the same with the newest drivers and older (I tried 6 drivers and olways the same)

So once again for people, who wuld have the same issue:
You have to enable the windows “desktop composition” to solve this issue