I was looking around in the help file to see how opensubdiv surfaces work in houdini, but could not find much about this?

I tried switching the algorithm in the subdivide SOP but it needs to be cooked first? How does this work? Apparently this was implemented at viewport display level as well.

see attached screengrab

Thanks MartyNz, I appreciate your help.

Can you change a subdiv object's displayed smoothing level in the viewport?

There's a depth slider in the Subdivide node, but I've never noticed if there's a keyboard equivalent to Softimage's Page Up / Page Down keys. Or modo's + / - keys.

Haven't seen one for the viewport subD- could be wrong though.

you can change it in Display Settings/Geometry/Level Of Detail
not sure if you can bind a shortcut to it though

as houdini supports Opensubdiv and there is an option in Houdini Preferences/3d Viewports/Allow Adaptive Subdivision I would assume that it can subdivide adaptively in the viewport (as in pixar demos for opensubdiv) so you shouldn't be needing to switch the LOD, but as my graphic card cannot show subds in OGL 3.3 I'm not sure if it does something or not

Great, the level of detail slider works nicely for viewing smooth OpenSubdiv surfaces. Thanks for the tip, tamte.