Hi Everybody,

I recently bought myself a 8800 GTX graphics card. But strangely enough, it runs much slower then my Geforce 6600 when it is drawing points and/or point nrs in the viewport.
On other operations such as wireframe drawing and polyrendering, the 8800 is indeed much faster then the 6600. This is also what you expect.

I've looked into the houdini forum for solutions and found here http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_forum&Itemid=172&page=viewtopic&t=7071&highlight=8800+nvidea [sidefx.com]
a possible solution.

I was able to turn the nvidea 8800 GTX into a quadro 4600 fx. But the results are exactly the same. Point and nr drawing is much slower on my new card.

Has anybody got idea's how to solve this issue?

Cheers.

Can you give some context? Is this with a heavy poly load, or something simply like a poly sphere with the resolution cranked? Is it “sorta” slower - or OMG WTF really slow?

Is there any chance you've set the Houdini OGL environment variable and set it to off(doing OGL in software)? Also, you're not running on Linux are you? If so, the custom drivers need to be installed and enabled, depending on distro this can be a pain.

Cheers,

J.C.

Hi J.C.

It is in like really really slow.

I'm using windows XP

how can I check wether it runs OGL in software?

On the 8800 the attached example updates about 3/fps, while on my 6600 the same object runs a smooth 25/fps.




when my 8800 renders only wireframe it runs very smoothly though.





here i did a rendering in the maya viewport a sphere with 2.000.000 vertices. This easily renders a 15 fps, compared to a slow 3 fps for a 29.500 vertex counting lsystem.

So if there are settings to change or any idea's how to solve this it would be greatly appreciated.

Yah, sorry, I'm not up on Windows driver issues, perhaps someone else can speak up.

As long as you installed Nvidia drivers successfully(if you upgraded the card, reinstall!) you'll be using OGL. The only way you could be disabling it in Houdini is if the envar HOUDINI_OGL_SOFTWARE was set. If you don't know where envars are set in windows then odds are you don't need to worry about it - you would have had to go out of your way to set that.

It does sound like Houdini isn't using the hardware, though.

Cheers,

J.C.

If you don't know where envars are set in windows then odds are you don't need to worry about it - you would have had to go out of your way to set that.

Or it was forgotten… I'm with John. Check to see that you have HOUDINI_OGL_SOFTWARE and if you do, remove it. You set Windows environment variables in start > Control Panel > System > Advanced and press the “Environment Variables” button.

I have a 8800 GTS and I see the problem, too. Windows XP SP2, up-to-date system updates, Forceware 97.92.
The OpenGL acceleration is certainly working, and performance is very adequate. The problem appears when one turns on the point display or the point number display. Is this normal? I mean I _think_ I remember that some time ago the performance didn't use to degrade so dramatically by turning on the point display.

Dragos

I can confirm that the 8800gtx has trouble with point numbers, etc displayed. Basically its turbo fast but as soon as you turn on points it starts to use the CPU to do all the work.

AFAIK the point numbers and points are displayed using overlay planes which the Geforce series doesn't support. (Only Quadro)

At different points in the past Nvidia's geforce cards were identical to quadro cards with certain features disabled. So it wouldn't surprise me if there was a few older geforce cards that supported overlay planes. (Possibly the 6600)

Wolfwood
AFAIK the point numbers and points are displayed using overlay planes which the Geforce series doesn't support. (Only Quadro)

Point numbers and points are drawn using bitmaps, not overlay planes.

Wolfwood
I can confirm that the 8800gtx has trouble with point numbers, etc displayed. Basically its turbo fast but as soon as you turn on points it starts to use the CPU to do all the work.

Sounds like the driver might not be quite there yet. Very few games would likely use this feature.

Thanks for correcting me.

I'll play around with the texture settings and see if I can get a boost.