Hey all -

I'm running Houdini 12.0.581 Apprentice on one of the latest iMacs, and the viewport is incredibly slow. Just displaying particles takes several seconds per frame. *Definitely* not working correctly – Linux installations I've used recently draw at a normal speed, and the machines were about as powerful as the one I'm using.

Oh, it's the latest Lion, using openGL 2.1. (3.2 doesn't exist on my machine, for some reason…)

Are there any special configuration steps needed? Anything I need to install? I do have the latest Xcode.

Anyone else run into this?

How might I debug this…?


Thanks! :-)

-anna

That sounds like some GL feature is dropping the points draw back to software, perhaps smoothed GL points. What video hardware is in your iMac, out of curiousity? An AMD 6750, 6770 or 6790? (it will say in Apple>About this Mac, Show Details)

It's the 6770.

Do you know if OpenGL 3.2 is supported on that card? It doesn't show up in the list of options.


Yes, it does look like it's doing the drawing in software. The CPU meter spikes up when I tumble around with a bunch of points in the viewport.

-anna

OpenGL 3.2 isn't supported on the Mac, as Apple wrote an entirely new driver for GL3.2 in OSX 10.7, but dropped all legacy GL features in it. While this is good for newly written applications, ones like Houdini with tens of thousands of lines of legacy GL code are difficult to port over. So for now, Houdini uses Apple's GL2.1 legacy driver to render, which isn't capable of supporting the OpenGL 3.2 renderer.

I will turn off point smoothing in the GL2.1 renderer for OSX and see if that solves the issue.

I also have this issue.
The viewport is almost unusably slow with some scenes.
In addition, the GL2.1 viewport seems worse than the H11 viewport!

MacBook Pro 17 (early 2011), 2.2GHz Quad-core Intel Core i7, 8GB RAM, AMD Radeon HD 6750M 1024 MB, 750GB, OS X Lion 10.7.3

I have the same issue with a ATI Radeon HD 5870 1024 MB on my MacPro machine. I Use OpenGL 2.1

When will it be fixed?

on my MacBook Pro with nvidida it works fine and fast. so is that specific to ati on os x?

Does anyone have a sample file for this? 10.6.8 + ATI 5770 seems to draw particles without issue.