Hi, I have the following problem:
On a mac pro dual xeon with ATI Radeon HD 5870 1024 MB and Lion OS (10.7.3) When enabled (default) the preference of the Render Scene GL 2.1 or GL 1.2 Houdini crash and when it is set to H11 all works normally Houdini crashes saying me that it occurred an fatal error (closes all).

Help Me :shock: :shock: :shock: :shock:

Daily build 12.0.555, which you can download from this link [sidefx.com], fixes this issue.

I tried the 555 and 556 but the problem remains :? :? :?: :?: :?:
Help

It must be something more specific to the AMD card (I have Quadro) or 10.7.3 (I have OSX 10.6.8 ).

This problem is not dependent by the video card driver but houdini 12 software??

Having similar problems, especially with Flips. Pyro work seems ok, but any attempt to use FLIP Fluids creates fatal error.

Having a fair few viewport related issues with my AMD 5770 on my mac pro (build 556).

- The openGL 3.2 viewport is disabled and it antialiasing is locked.
- Turning on openCl and pressing play causes a instant crash
- Using openGL 1.2 or 2.2 causes come artifacting or rendering issues in the viewport.

At first I thought it was due to having a relatively weak gfx card, but openGL/CL goodness all works fine under windows, so looks like its an osx issue .

So was wondering whether (a) what kind of issues people are having on mac, and whether they have the same problems and (b) whether would it be useful to submit bug reports for these?

@ andrewusher:
With regards to FLIP fluids causing crashing, try setting the particle display type to anything other than sprites. I vaguely recall seeing that this had been fixed in a recent build though. Unfortunately not at my workstation right now so can't check.

This problem is not dependent by the video card driver but houdini 12 software??

What I'm saying is that Houdini 12 works with 10.6.8 and a Quadro, but is running into some issue when running 10.7.3 and/or an AMD card. It's a Houdini bug, but one specific to one of those configurations.

- The openGL 3.2 viewport is disabled and it antialiasing is locked.

The GL3 viewport is not available on the Mac due to OpenGL driver issues. . The OpenGL 3.2 driver in 10.7 is OpenGL core profile only, and Houdini requires a lot of the features removed from this profile. Antialiasing is not available because GL_ARB_texture_multisample is not supported in the legacy GL2.1 driver

Currently Mac users are limited to the GL2.1 renderer.

At first I thought it was due to having a relatively weak gfx card, but openGL/CL goodness all works fine under windows, so looks like its an osx issue Sad.

Apple writes their own OpenGL and OpenCL libraries, which interface with vendor drivers. They are not quite up to par with Nvidia or AMD yet.

The situation with Apple's openGL support is somewhat frustrating: I had thought that with 10.7 they had finally moved to 3.2, but I guess it was only partial. Hopefully 10.8 will bring the necessary updates.

It's good know what the root of these issues are (and that they are known, if not really addressable atm). Thanks for the detailed info twod.

I had thought that with 10.7 they had finally moved to 3.2, but I guess it was only partial.

They have moved to GL3.2. The problem is that Apple produced a separate OpenGL library for GL3, which only contains the GL3.2 core features. If you want to use the older GL1 and 2 features, you need to use their legacy GL2.1 driver. Since a vast amount of Houdini uses OpenGL, it wasn't feasible to convert all of the drawing code outside the viewport to GL3.2 for H12 (nor useful to do so outside the context of OSX).

We will continue to work on it, and see if it's possible to run an application with some windows running the legacy driver, and others running their new GL3.2 driver (the viewports). The alternative is a sweep through all drawing code to update it to GL3.2 (UI, MPlay, other viewports like IPR/COPs, animation editor, etc).