Sadly, more badness. Disappearing hair and viewport slowdowns. MacOs might not be Houdini ready???

EDIT: Missing hair bug logged as Bug #100391
curveSop slowdown bug (ID# 100483)

Tested your viewport file on 17.5.327, MBP15 (2017) with 560m GPU on Mojave 10.14.6. Got around 90 FPS. The first scene worked fine as well.

Seems to be a AMD bug.

What machine are you running on? Is it a real mac or some kind of hackintosh? And what AMD card? There has been some issues with the vega series over the years, especially 10.14.5 was very problematic on vega64/radeon vii etc

That sounds pretty sad for the new Mac Pro, considering AMD is the future on this platform…

This machine is a Mac Pro 5.1 with a RX 580 8GB. It was reconmended on the Apple website.

The RX 580 is very safe in OSX. I don't know exactly what is going on, but a good test would be to see if you can install Houdini on a different Mac and see if the problems persist. Sometimes these things are not easily repeatable, even with identical systems.

Ok, I just opened your Curve file. Here's what's happening (this is on my Mac Book Air running the latest Catalina and H.391):

In the OBJ context, there are no slowdowns.

In the SOP context, if I select the Auto-Select PSR tool, then I experience the slowdown, however, if I click on the Move, Rotate or Scale tools individually, then I experience no slowdown. Further, if after clicking on the Move tool, I go back to the Auto tool, the slowdown is gone.

Sounds like a bug, and since I don't have an AMD GPU on this machine, I'm pretty sure it's not AMD-related.

Looks like its just bad houdini code - 1080ti, Linux and viewport drops from >120fps to 40 displaying 300 points. Just is way worse on MacSO

Is anyone getting stuck in tumble mode on MacOS? Where you need to press esc key to get out.

H17.5.417

P.S. jumping on a Windows laptop, Houdini runs way better. i7-7700HQ 4 core @ 2.8/turbo 3.8, Win10, gtx 1060, 16GB ram. Not getting any of the sillyness seen in this thread. Sad.

EDIT: unfortunately Windows also has the hair disapperaing issue with HQ lighting… maybe Linux is the only good one out there! Bug (ID# 100479).

goat
Is anyone getting stuck in tumble mode on MacOS? Where you need to press esc key to get out.

H17.5.417

I think it happened to me before, and I traced it down to a funky Bluetooth mouse/keyboard combo.

can you please try - view tool/camera icon.

Press LMB, then click RMB (whilst holding the LMB), then release LMB, then release RMB. The viewport should stay locked in tumble mode.

EDIT: This issue affects the tab menu too. Once you do the LMB then RMB release trick, as above, the tab menu then automatically will drop a node when your cursor leaves the submenu. This causes the wrong node to be dropped and much frustration. See screen recording.