RunsWithScissors
What about Nvidia cards causing a fuzzy drifting interface?

It is the strangest thing I have ever seen before. everything inside the windows border is blury. and thing are drifting to the upper righthand corner. I have a Geforce 4 ti4400 128mb ddr card I can add the

HOUDINI_OGL_SOFTWARE 1 and the interface is fine although a little slow.

Are Nvidia Consumer cards not supported for Hardware OGL?

Given the great interest in using Houdini with nVidia based cards, I figure I'll start its own thread to cover the bases (again ).

In my experience, nVidia cards do not require HOUDINI_OGL_SOFTWARE. The “blurry interface” problem you are experiencing is due to your driver settings. Make sure you turn off Anti-Aliasing and Ansitropic Filtering. I haven't tried it but you may also need to turn off Texture Sharpening.

On GeForce cards (as opposed to Quadro), various OpenGL features are only supported in software. The most noticeable one in Houdini being anti-aliased lines. You can easily turn this off in Houdini to speed up your performance. From Houdini's menu Edit menu at the top, choose Preferences… On the General page, turn off Draw Lines Smoothly. Quadro cards do not seem to suffer from this problem.

I've been experiencing problems on my GeForce2 GTS with the 41.09 driver. I'd recommend trying the 40.72 drivers instead for GeForce cards. I haven't noticed the same problems with the 41.09 drivers on the Quadro however.

On Linux, it seems that turning off the environment variables HOUDINI_OGL_DBL_BUFFER_FIX has the reverse effect of slowing things down instead of speeding things up. I wasn't given the exact driver numbers in that particular case though. So this is an environment variable worth trying off and on.

Finally, a primer on how to set environment variables on Windows XP from the originating thread ( http://www.sidefx.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=15 [sidefx.com] ).

Under Windows XP, to set environment variables, right-click on My Computer and choose Properties. Switch to the “Advanced” tab and click on the “Environment Variables” near the bottom. Then under “System Variables”, push the “New” button. Finally, type in “HOUDINI_OGL_DBL_BUFFER_FIX” (without the quotes) inside “Variable Name:” and put a “1” (without the quotes) inside “Variable Value:”. Now just hit the OK button until you're out. For Windows NT and Windows 2000 systems, the process is similar although labels have been changed and renamed slightly.

Hope that helps!

I just tried the HOUDINI_OGL_DBL_BUFFER_FIX set to 1. It slowed down houdini slightly and I noticed my box had some lag redrawing channel editor sizing and desktop redraw.

So I set it to 0 and it was back to normal.

However for both setting the chops was slow displaying waveforms.

Like I said the audio works fine as long as i dont display the waveform. I know there are issues as far as supporting consumer cards but since 1 in 3 computers uses a consumer based nvidia card I think there is motivation to see if there is some sort of way of getting around this.

Cheerz!

oh and I am runnng the latest build which I believe is 6.0.278

Hello,

This was not quite the same problem, but I thought perhaps I should share the “solution” here in case anyone else is running into it.

My cards a GeForce4 440 GO.

I was getting some funky display problems with the “shaded/textured view”. Resetting the “near clipping plane” (in the “Display Options” under the “culling” tab) to a value of .1 (instead of it's default something like .001) seemed to do the trick.

Not the same thing, but perhaps it can help solve someone else's problem that will be reading this thread.

jim
www.secret-sauce.com

Jim, thank you! I got a funky display too.. particularly looking like “chopped up” edges that changed with dollying. Changing the near clipping plane fixed it right up!

This should be a sticky!!

It is, but if you view through a camera make sure the near clipping plane is also moved forward other wise your viewport will reset itself to the camera setting.

However for both setting the chops was slow displaying waveforms.

Older GeForce cards had problems drawing smooth lines with any kind of speed - for some reason, AA-lines was only supported on Quadro cards. As the Chop waveform display uses smooth lines, and a lot of them, it can really show off this problem.

To fix, go to Settings -> Main Preferences -> General User Interface and turn off ‘Draw Lines Smoothly’ (Apply). The lines will be jaggy, but fast.

edward
I've been experiencing problems on my GeForce2 GTS with the 41.09 driver. I'd recommend trying the 40.72 drivers instead for GeForce cards.

Hi Edward you've got the same Graphics card as me, do you get Houdini crashing when you close an mplay window?
The lastest drivers on nvidia are 61.77 so 40.09 drivers seem very old.

You know what? I think it's crashing because of standalone mode too!