@goat: I def want to try that other OS concept but I don't have windows. My plan is to figure out how to get a linux install and try the same test. If I ever get it running I will post here.

Linux can be installed on a USB and booted with the option key. Ubuntu is the easiest to use as it has the most help available. Should take about 30min to complete.

You may need to install AMD Linux drivers though to get the full graphics acceleration.

I'd love to boot Linux via USB but I'd still need to install Houdini on an OS-compatible drive, right? I've never attempted this on Mac so it scares me a bit.

Houdini should install on the USB with Linux on it.

@len, just testing the exact same example as you did with the rubbertoy, I get 40 fpm( that is 1500 ms update) on my 2017 MPB.
Using an egpu (for accellerating the laptops screen) with a vega64 I get 11 fps (91 ms)
To me it seems the drivers for NAVI series of cards are not really finished yet on Mac but at least the 2019 16“ is faster than the ”old" MBP. I don't know why my orignal scene that I talked about first was faster to render, maybe I did something wrong there.


And for reference, on my PC with 2080ti I get 35 fps (28 ms) on the same scene…

For those in a crunch for point display performance, you might want to try changing in the viewport display options > Geometry tab > Display particls as > Pixels.

I successfully got Ubuntu running on a USB stick and got Houdini running as well on my MBP 16.
Unfortunately, the graphics driver must be crud because I'm getting about 4 fps just orbiting the default rubber duck (no point scatter)!
It shows up simply as AMD Graphics or something similar.
Until I figure that out I won't be seeing comparable performance numbers for this shiny new laptop.

Good work and almost there. That built-in Mesa driver will be slow.

Try the AMD drivers.
https://www.amd.com/en/support/kb/release-notes/rn-amdgpu-unified-linux [www.amd.com]

In theory, you should be only ~15% slower than 1060
https://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Nvidia-GTX-1060-Mobile-vs-AMD-Radeon-Pro-5500M/m164336vsm960765 [gpu.userbenchmark.com]

Houdini gets stuck on startup totally not responding. I have a MacOS Big Sur with M1 chip. The license manager finally works, but Houdini itself, non commercial version doesn't start. It opened once, worked well and after the first crash, for trying to increase resolution fails starting.
I rebooted my mac, reinstalled everything, cried multiple times Would appreciate any help.

Does anyone have these issues on a Mac with a paid license? Or is it just the free?

There's no difference between commercial/non-commercial builds. The program's behaviour just changes depending on if it's a commercial or non-commercial license. Note that there's currently no official M1 support.

stigersh
Houdini gets stuck on startup totally not responding. I have a MacOS Big Sur with M1 chip.

I assume this on a Mac Mini or iMac?

Here's what I suspect -- Houdini Apprentice calls home to get an authorization from SideFX servers directly (in Canada I presume?), and sometimes their servers are not online or they're having some issues. I had problems in the past launching Houdini Apprentice which would absolutely not work one day, and the next day launched without issues.

The paid versions of Houdini don't seem to suffer from this since I suspect they store the license information locally and only poll the servers occasionally to see if the license is still valid.

I could be wrong of course, but that's the only explanation I can think of for this behavior.

I'm running Houdini Indie on an M1 Mac Book Air and it runs fine without any issues except some ARM incompatibility which typically doesn't impact me.

Midphase

stigersh
Houdini gets stuck on startup totally not responding. I have a MacOS Big Sur with M1 chip.

I assume this on a Mac Mini or iMac?

Thanks for the reply, I've just noticed it.. I'm on MacBookPro. I've installed the Houdini Launcher and it worked for a while, but then again after some random crash (just scrolling the zoom) I couldn't start the program again, and even after restarting my mac several times.
From some reason I can't run the indie version though I have a license. Here is the error screen shot

That line you have highlighted in the license administrator is for the "Renderer". The actual one you want tokens for is "Houdini FX Education" I think. But there you have one line in the image that has "0/1" tokens and the other one has "1/1". This looks like a licensing issue to me and you should email support AT sidefx.com for help.

Len
For posterity: I've solved my issues with my new MacBook Pro 16" and H18!
It's working quite nicely now.

The fix in brief: Turn on File Sharing in the OS X Prefs Sharing panel.

Here's the background, that may affect whether this help you or not:
I got a new MBP and used Time Machine to transfer my old MBP's apps and user into onto it.
When that finished (after many hours) it said it could not transfer the entire user account correctly. It was a little unclear what went wrong, but I ended up with two accounts: a new one and the old one, which really was just a folder with all the data inside.
Now I launch H18 (from the new account) and have to return the licenses from the old computer to accommodate the new one. This was accompanied by me changing the computer's share name, in order to distinguish it from the old one. This was probably a very bad idea.
The key sign of the problem was the License Admin tool not showing a valid IP address for the server. It was unclear why.
But when I turned File Sharing on, it must have allowed the server to finally read a config file or something similar.
Instantly H18's launch time became a few seconds and my Render View updates are near instantaneous.
I can't explain why it worked for an hour while sitting at a cafe with no internet access....that's a mystery.
Hope you don't run into this problem!

I just wanted to say that I've come back to this post multiple times since first installing Houdini on my M1 mac however long ago. First with 19.0 and now with 19.5. I just updated to 19.5 today and installation went smooth but license server was complaining about something "cannot find license server host" or something. It seemed the server was still running, I restarted the server using terminal commands. All I could do was connect to the "SideFX Login Server" option. I thought I had changed the computer name or something, but it still matched the local host that came up.

In short, the fix is always "Turn on File Sharing in the OS X Prefs Sharing panel." Took a while to find the post again, but that's all it took and it could connect to the license server. It seems like once it's installed, you can turn "File Sharing" back off again.