Hello,

I’m encountering a color management issue in Houdini 20.5.550 and newer.
When rendering the same scene with Karma CPU and Karma XPU, the resulting images look noticeably different — the XPU render appears correct, while the CPU render looks color shifted

This behavior did not occur in earlier versions (e.g. Houdini 20.5.278), where both renders matched perfectly.

Additional details:
Houdini version: 20.5.550 and above
All textures are .exr files in ACEScg color space
Color management: OCIO config houdini-config-v2.1.0_aces-v1.3_ocio-v2.3.ocio
OS: Linux

My guess would be that the auto-generated texture cache for XPU from earlier version is stale but it's still being picked up by the new version, so whatever color management policy change that happened between the versions isn't being reflected in the new renders.
Can you try removing all auto-generated .rat files (should be where your .exr files are by default) and see if there's any change in behaviour?