I recently bought a laptop which I will use for some work when I don't have my desktop around. The laptop has two graphic cards, the intel HD 4000 and an AMD Radeon HD 7730M. The problem is that it uses switchable graphics and although I have set the houdini .exe to use the high performance card, it still does not seem to use it. Every time I open Houdini it shows a message it's viewing it in OpenGL and lots of data in my scenes is not visible because of that..
I had the same problem with Premiere Pro but found a solution where a certain .exe along with the main one also needed to be set to use the high performance card.

Does anyone know if Houdini has a similar .exe that also needs to be set to high performance besides just the main .exe or does anyone know a way to set the radeon card as the standard card?

The drivers are all up to date (and reinstalled again).

EDIT: I installed a different version of the Catalyst control center and this seemed to fix the problem for most applications.. except for Houdini. It can only use the GL1.2 and in the about it says it is using:
OpenGL Renderer: GDI Generic (so not my radeon card?)
version: 1.1.0
Detected: Generic GDI Consumer
Unknown VRAM
Unknown Driver Version

does anyone know what to do about this?

Yes, Houdini is defaulting to software rendering rather than using the Radeon. You'll want the following added to the “high performance” list:

houdini.exe
hescape.exe
hkey.exe
mplay.exe
gplay.exe

We do attempt to detect Intel graphics and switch to software mode if its found, however this is only supposed to happen if there is a single GPU in the system. This might be somehow missing the Radeon on your system, and incorrectly dropping to software mode. Which Windows version are you using?

The current workaround is to set the environment variable HOUDINI_OGL_SOFTWARE to the value 0 prior to starting Houdini.

In order to help debug this issue, can you run the attached binary and post the generated output?

Thank you both for your help! creating the variable and setting it to 0 seemed to correct it.

twod thank you for mentioning the items for the high performance list and I think the problem was indeed what you mentioned, houdini missing the radeon somehow. I am using Windows 8 btw.

Edward thank you for mentioning the fix. I've tried running the .exe you included but it mentions a certain .dll file is not present anywhere so I'm downloading that right now and I will post the generated output a bit later today.

I've recompiled it from source, hopefully this version won't need extra dll's.

Note that you should run it from cmd.exe so that you can copy/paste the output from it.

Here is the output

Thanks for the vid_test output! I think I have an idea on how to fix this now. I'll post here when it's fixed. Thanks!

This should now be fixed for tomorrow's Houdini 12.5.383 daily build. Please let me know if you still have problems *without* the HOUDINI_OGL_SOFTWARE variable set.

Fantastic! I'll try it out once it's released

Hi guys!
The last daily build solve my problem in parts… Houdini works well, but i can´t visualize any volume in viewport… any idea about what I'm doing wrong?
Thanks!

EDIT: In “about Houdini” all informations appear ok, except vram… vram appears Unknow VRAM.
I discover other problens, gplay, mplay and others windows, freeze when i move or resize.
I use Houdini 12.5.408, Win 8 and the latest amd driver…
Thanks!

Here's the output from my test file.

Hi Simon,

In fixing the AMD switchable graphics, I had inadvertently broken the nVidia Optimus detection. However, this should have been corrected in 12.5.404. Which Houdini 12.5 version are you using exactly?