So i'm trying to get more detailed smoke by using very small grid cell size(is it right way to go btw?), and eventually H12 crashes my nVidia drivers and H12 in turn. Is it normal behaviour?

I'm on Windows7 x64, geforce gtx 580 with 1.5gb mem.

PS: bug is 100% repeatable. I don't have other machines to test it, but it crashes almost every time for me.

It shouldn't be crashing, it is supposed to error out with a red flag when a memory allocation error occurs. There was a problem with this detection, however, which hopefully will be fixed with tomorrows build.

And yes, small grid sizes is the way to go.

You can try turning off resizing of the grid to get more consistent memory allocation that can help the driver out (but in turn requires you to simulate more voxels at the start…)

I have a friend with some old quadro on notebook, he tested it yesterday and it seems it's perfectly stable on it, but on geforce 580 and 470 using opencl imminently leads to driver crash/restore sequence in few minutes.

Did you get any major speed increase with your 580? I haven't seen much of a difference between CPU and a 560Ti, so for now I think I'll stick with the CPU (which also is much more stable, I had a number of GPU related crashs too, and proper OS crashes, not just Houdini)

It's definitely faster on GPU, maybe speed is below my expectations, but as jfait explained in a separate post, it's because of the way things organized for complex sims/pyro fx. But yes, it's faster, on my rough estimate by 10%-100% depending on setup, compared to cpu.

Althought i'm going to stick to cpu version as well, because OS driver crash is not what you're looking for, especially taking into account houdini just disappears after restore.