Hi everyone,

I wanted to flag a severe stability issue with the default Vulkan Viewport in Houdini 21 on Linux (specifically Ubuntu/Pop!_OS setups with high-end Nvidia hardware like the RTX 3090).

Interacting with the viewport triggers massive, system-wide display server deadlocks.
The entire operating system freezes completely for several seconds at a time.
Sometimes the UI enters a "zombie" state where live texture/icon caches break, turning the playbar and toolbars into flat grey blocks.

The only solution I found was to bypass the Vulkan viewport and falling back to the mature OpenGL engine instantly resolves the issue, restoring 100% system responsiveness.

To fix this permanently, add this line to your houdini.env file:

Hopefully, the SideFX dev team can address these specific Linux driver stalls soon.
Please me know if anyone else has run into this or logged an official bug ID!

I did notice Houdini freezing, or being super slow on Wayland on Ubuntu 26.04. When I downgraded to 580 nvidia driver version, I did not notice this happening. Might be that it is Nvidia driver related?

Support is recommending that people stay on 580 for now as there have been a number of reported issues with 590+.

johnmather
Support is recommending that people stay on 580 for now as there have been a number of reported issues with 590+.

Thanks for the suggestion. Just for clarification, I'm already on NVIDIA driver 580.159.03, specifically because of the reports of issues with the 590+ series. I'm also still running X11 rather than Wayland, so neither of those factors applies in my case. The problem is occurring with that configuration on Pop!_OS.

chf
To fix this permanently, add this line to your houdini.env file:

Seems like you missed to paste line? Is it maybe

{"HOUDINI_VULKAN_VIEWER": "0"},

On cachy os everything works great but in Solaris at one point everything just hangs.. not the system but only Houdini, and only thing sort of working is x to close it, at least I can save and close but still rather annoying. Ive added this line now to see if it helps but there is still only VK option for view port in GUI so.. will test out abit.


Hope that H22 will have proper wayland support as every single Linux distro moved away from X11 even removing it completely so you can't even fall back to it and reinstalling it can just bring in world of pain so.. Hopeing for proper wayland support!