It would be good to be able to see textures in the viewport as you are texturing instead I have to render frames to see what is going on.
Plus it would be great if i could get some benefit for my graphics card in regard this, GPU renders.
Coming from Max and Vray I am finding this side of Houdini a little wanting.

Have you tried turning on Textures for the viewport? It may be turned off. Use the D-KEY to bring up the display options and check the settings. Often HDR Rendering is off.

What graphics card are you using?

Hi, Thanks for the reply.

I can see bitmaps but I can't get to see noise texture which requires adjusting in viewports. The render view just doesn't work period, I am on indie. Just get the generating scene and then nothing ever happens.

I have 2 titan x 12 GB cards on a dual Xeon system with 48 GB of ram.

The speed of GPU previews in Vray is astounding, would be great to hear if Houdini was getting the ability to use GPUs to help in this process.

If it's procedural noise generated by a VOP, it can't be previewed in the viewport. The viewport does not convert VOPs to GLSL, instead it picks some of the shader parameters and feeds those to its own GLSL shaders (such as colors, texture map files etc).

You can use the Render Region tool to select an area of the viewport and preview that way.