Hi, I was wondering if there were any guides available for optimizing the performance of Houdini Apprentice. I get a lot of delay between commands that really makes it inefficient to use. Currently my computer's specs are an Intel E6400 processor, 5 GB RAM, ATI Radeon HD 2600XT with 512 MB RAM, and a western digital raptor (10,000 rpm) primary disk drive. I know the video card is a gaming card and not a workstation card, but I'm getting a lot of delay after commands when I'm using fairly simple scenes- modeling with less than a few thousand polygons, no textures or anything else. I'm running Vista Business 64-bit, which I know isn't great, but I'm still surprised to see so much delay when all my other software runs okay. Am I missing some general settings or obvious tweaks?

Hi,

Unfortunately, ATI drivers do not have proper OpenGL support. Please search through the forums to see what driver versions other ATI users are using.

Good luck!

Cheers!
steven

When I have utorrent aplication turned on and internet connection estabilished my houdini also responds very slowly, you know, 2-3 second delay between command choose and node apearing/change in viewport, so if I use houdini I try to have not to much filled internet connection

Thanks for the replies.

stevenong
Unfortunately, ATI drivers do not have proper OpenGL support. Please search through the forums to see what driver versions other ATI users are using.

I'm considering just getting a Quadro card, since both the ATI cards I have access to aren't performing great. I was looking at the selection at www.newegg.com, and the FX570 seems like a reasonable price for my budget; the FX1700 is more than twice as expensive for twice the amount of video RAM. Performance-wise, would the FX570 be adequate for a hobbyist just looking to learn the software and fool around, or will I end up kicking myself 6 months down the line for not going for 512 MB RAM?

AmmonsHorn
Thanks for the replies.

stevenong
Unfortunately, ATI drivers do not have proper OpenGL support. Please search through the forums to see what driver versions other ATI users are using.

I'm considering just getting a Quadro card, since both the ATI cards I have access to aren't performing great. I was looking at the selection at www.newegg.com, and the FX570 seems like a reasonable price for my budget; the FX1700 is more than twice as expensive for twice the amount of video RAM. Performance-wise, would the FX570 be adequate for a hobbyist just looking to learn the software and fool around, or will I end up kicking myself 6 months down the line for not going for 512 MB RAM?

Gee, my gforce7300GT for a 80$ is more than enough! You really want this card, don't you?

Don't blame Houdini for this

Cheers,
sy.

SYmek
Gee, my gforce7300GT for a 80$ is more than enough! You really want this card, don't you?

Don't blame Houdini for this

Quite the contrary, I'd rather not spend any money at all on a new card, but neither of the ATI gamer cards are working out for me, and everyone seems to vote Nvidia. However I'm concerned that I'm going to run into problems going that route if I try another gamer level card. So that's why I was looking at the workstation cards, but I don't have any experience with them and wanted to make sure that if I did spend any more money, I wouldn't be shortchanging myself on performance.

AmmonsHorn

SYmek
Gee, my gforce7300GT for a 80$ is more than enough! You really want this card, don't you?

Don't blame Houdini for this

Quite the contrary, I'd rather not spend any money at all on a new card, but neither of the ATI gamer cards are working out for me, and everyone seems to vote Nvidia. However I'm concerned that I'm going to run into problems going that route if I try another gamer level card. So that's why I was looking at the workstation cards, but I don't have any experience with them and wanted to make sure that if I did spend any more money, I wouldn't be shortchanging myself on performance.

Houdini is not very good at dealing with millions of poly anyway so you won't see the power of high-end card besides maybe stability and elegance (-> drivers quality).

There are two opinion on this nowadays. One says that middle class Gforce card behave similar or even better than Quadro since most of the industry has switch to low class cards anyway. It was said even by SESI itself that they rewrote whole Houdini OLG framwork to shape it better for such a cards.

Another vote says, Quadro kicks ass gforce any time, and it's worth to invest in. The point is that people here seems to be happy with their goforces (7 and 8 series) and usually don't see much difference. So if not so much big difference means thousand of dollar… you have the picture.

cheers,
sy.

PS Houdini can be slow because of a number of reasons and none of them will be related to GPU performance. Rather drivers, firewall issues, python.
For instance, on one of my Windows system I have a constant unsolved problem with Houdini slowness which is directly related to Python GUI script's performance as I see it. Constant 4 seconds of delay in every action including simply render to mplay. I don't bother with it since I'm not using this OS and all these issues disappear on the same machine on Linux.

SYmek
So if not so much big difference means thousand of dollar… you have the picture.

Thanks for the input. There are a lot of rebates for 7000/8000 series video cards right now, so I could reasonably get a card for under $70; I might just take the risk and try one of those out to see if it solves my problem. Other than that I'm not too savvy with drivers/software issues, so if it's gonna be slow, then it's gonna be slow. Thanks again though.