hi , I have a quadrofx 4500 and I bout it mostly cause I saw the new viewport shading features in Houdini 11 , But the thing is when I use Houdini , a lot if the features seam to cause it to slow down, and I think I know why ,maybe it has something to do with my settings on the nvidea control panel (antialaising, opengl rendering cup, etc)

So I would like to know winch ones are the best settings in the nvidea control panel to use with Houdini 11?

Don't force anything in the Nvidia control panel, such as AA, vertical sync or anisotropic filtering. Maxing texture quality features can also have a negative impact on performance.

The QuadroFX 4500 is also the last of the OpenGL 2 generation (or DirectX9), so there are some things it does slower because it doesn't have hardware optimizations that OpenGL3 (DirectX 10) hardware has. For example, HQ Lighting has to be drawn in 2 passes rather than 1, and an omnidirectional point light shadow uses 6 depth maps rather than a single depth cubemap (which would run in software - very slow).

High Quality lighting was also designed to be used primarily in the final stages of creating a scene, for lighting work. The shaders match as closely as possible the final rendered result, so image quality is maximized at the expense of performance in this mode. It isn't advisable to keep it on throughout the entire design process (though I suppose you could if you had an absolute monster of a graphics card).

Hope that helps.

Thanks for the answer …
so this card its not so powerful as i thought it was… :cry:
i thought i made a good choice cause i bought it for $180.

But okey , winch are the settings that u advice me to use inside Houdini, or it would be hard for you to tell me ?

EDITED: i changed most of the settings to application controlled after reading you post.

Quadro cards are numbered slightly differently than GEforce cards. A GEForce card's first number is the generation, while the second number represents the performance relative to others in that generation. On Quadros, those numbers are reversed - the performance number is first, generation second.

That card should be able to do Material Shaders and Medium Quality Transparency and Volumes without issue. You can try 2x or 4x AA, though the limited amount of VRAM on the card may limit performance, especially if HDR rendering or HQ Lighting is on. I would recommend avoing those two unless you really need them, and only then for specific lighting tasks.

I have limited budget, can Quadro FX 600 card, help in running Houdini smoothly.

anth3568
I have limited budget, can Quadro FX 600 card, help in running Houdini smoothly.

It depends on what graphics card you have installed at the moment, whether this would be any improvement. Certainly at $200 the Quadro 600 is a good deal. All the Quadros now have 1GB at a minimum, which is important for a 3D workstation. Just stay away from the Quadro NVS cards - they are not workstation class cards (business multi-monitor). At this point, an OpenGL4 card with at least 1GB VRAM is recommended.

I have noticed that a Quadro with similar or lesser specs than a GEForce card runs Houdini smoother in general. I have tested both a Quadro 4000 (256 shaders, 470Mhz, 2GB) and a GEForce 460 (336 shaders, 675Mhz, 768MB). Whether it's the extra VRAM or drivers, the Quadro felt less laggy than the GEForce, even with the GEForce's increased shader power.