Houdini 11.0.438: Worked around some basic display issues when using HOUDINI_OGL_SOFTWARE on recent Windows OSes (Vista, 7). These include strangely rendered axes in the viewport and blocky fonts appearing in the help tips and status bar.

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The above fix needs to be ported to non Windows OSes too.

I am seeing a lot of blocky fonts

HOUDINI_OGL_SOFTWARE only works on Windows OSes, so there is nothing to port. What graphics hardware & driver version are you running, and which Linux distribution?

No worries then.

Here is the back story.

I am running it on a very small laptop with Nvidia ION2 / Intel GMA 3150 chip, due to the presence of Optimus (no linux drivers), Ubuntu 10.04 LTS can only benefit from the Intel chip.

I use this laptop when I travel away from the studio (which has proper workstations)

Let's take this offline if Side Effects wish to pursue fixing the problem, I can provide more technical details.

BTW, I have shown this problem to Side Effects in person when I met them in November 2010.

Come to think of it, this might be important if the next generation of MacBook Pro is purely Intel HD Graphics.

Just a thought (ahead) ;-)

Apple's OpenGL driver for Intel graphics are actually better than Intel's own, so aside from performance issues, they should work okay on Macs. The irony…

On other platforms, it's not looking very promising, however (OpenGL Forum post [opengl.org]).