Dear Forumers,

I am about to come into a few thousand pounds and am going to buy the Apprentice Houdini and make the switch from damned cracks of Maya etc which are driving me up the wall!

I was looking to buy some powerful new hardware to beef up my system and am not sure what is good for Houdini.

I currently have a…

Asus Z9PE-D8 WS motherboard (which has 2 CPU slots)
1 Intel Xeon 10 Core 2.1Ghz
8GB of Kingston HyperX DDR3 1600 RAM
120GB SSD
1.5TB normal drive
Some super cheap Nvidia card

I wanna get another CPU and apparently it has to be exactly the same one so no problems there.

I was also gunna get another 7 sticks of the same RAM.

I guess my main question was what graphics card to get?
I understand Houdini can only support 1?
Will this speed up simulations if it is a TESLA for example?

Any advice from anyone much appreciated.

Cheers,

Nick.

Man, I am starting with apprentice and I'm very disappointed about the speed of simulation and rendering (yes, both).

The most important advice that i can give you is to buy an Nvidia with CUDA support. In the next months you are going to see many advances in interactive rendering.

Studios like ILM and Pixar have been implementing GPU computing recently and the results are amazing.

Now we are seeing software like Vray, Mental Ray, Octane Render, Indigo Render and Cycles with CUDA support.

If you buy a graphics card to work with Houdini, don't expect to see a huge difference but if you use it with other industry standard software you will make a big investment.

pedro3145
Men, I am starting with apprentice and I'm very disappointed about the speed of simulation and rendering (yes, both).

This is analogous to saying the paintbrush is very disappointing as it can't draw a good picture

In answer to original post on Houdini graphics card, more cores, higher speeds, more ram will benefit the viewport and OpenCL processing. Houdini can use one card for graphics and the other for OpenCL processing.

Is OpenCL for simuations???

Yup - simulations currently - you can get some pretty high performance gains, the caveat is that once you mix up interactions with collisions iirc, then the gains do diminish.

OpenCL can also run on the CPU, good when the GPU ram isn't enough!

I wonder what the sim and render time would do to you once you start working in a company where you get to share resources juggled with high standards!

@topic starter - I would consider getting a second machine for sim and render. Probably the one you're using right now? At least get a capable enough machine to run low sim tests.

Well I have two machines already. My other is a relatively powerful laptop. Quad i7, 32GB RAM.

Also what is iirc?

Yes ,nvidia with CUDA Support is a really cool
I working with 4 PC ,two of them has ATI VGA and the others has nvidia ,on my PC's Houdini working better with nvidia ,specially on Linux Mint (Both one are great ,But I think nvidia is a little better)

Also I working with Quadro 4000 ,But If you can ,buy Titan ,It's really powerful and Impressive

To take more Information about different type of the VGA (Specially ATI & nvidia) just search in the Houdini's Forums ,You will find interesting information about problems , features of them with experiences of the people

I was going to get these two to do Maximus with Maya:

Dell nVidia Tesla K20 Kepler 5Gb GDDR5 PCI-E GPU Computing Module 2496 CUDA Core


DELL nVidia QUADRO K2000 Kepler 2Gb GDDR5 PCI-E Card 384 CUDA Cores

Also good for Houdini?

Thanks for the help btw.

5DN
I was going to get these two to do Maximus with Maya:

Dell nVidia Tesla K20 Kepler 5Gb GDDR5 PCI-E GPU Computing Module 2496 CUDA Core


DELL nVidia QUADRO K2000 Kepler 2Gb GDDR5 PCI-E Card 384 CUDA Cores

Also good for Houdini?

Thanks for the help btw.

Yes ,They are really cool ,Just don't forget to update drivers and install Last Houdini Build

MartybNz

pedro3145
Men, I am starting with apprentice and I'm very disappointed about the speed of simulation and rendering (yes, both).

This is analogous to saying the paintbrush is very disappointing as it can't draw a good picture

In answer to original post on Houdini graphics card, more cores, higher speeds, more ram will benefit the viewport and OpenCL processing. Houdini can use one card for graphics and the other for OpenCL processing.

I'm not talking about about the result, I'm talking about the speed. Which is, in fact, slow. Mantra is not Arnold when it comes to memory efficiency.

Show us your results please - if you're just starting out how do you know that you are setting things up to be like-for -like in tests.