Hi everyone,

I wanted to flag a severe stability issue with the default Vulkan Viewport in Houdini 21 on Linux (specifically Ubuntu/Pop!_OS setups with high-end Nvidia hardware like the RTX 3090).

Interacting with the viewport triggers massive, system-wide display server deadlocks.
The entire operating system freezes completely for several seconds at a time.
Sometimes the UI enters a "zombie" state where live texture/icon caches break, turning the playbar and toolbars into flat grey blocks.

The only solution I found was to bypass the Vulkan viewport and falling back to the mature OpenGL engine instantly resolves the issue, restoring 100% system responsiveness.

To fix this permanently, add this line to your houdini.env file:

Hopefully, the SideFX dev team can address these specific Linux driver stalls soon.
Please me know if anyone else has run into this or logged an official bug ID!

I did notice Houdini freezing, or being super slow on Wayland on Ubuntu 26.04. When I downgraded to 580 nvidia driver version, I did not notice this happening. Might be that it is Nvidia driver related?

Support is recommending that people stay on 580 for now as there have been a number of reported issues with 590+.

johnmather
Support is recommending that people stay on 580 for now as there have been a number of reported issues with 590+.

Thanks for the suggestion. Just for clarification, I'm already on NVIDIA driver 580.159.03, specifically because of the reports of issues with the 590+ series. I'm also still running X11 rather than Wayland, so neither of those factors applies in my case. The problem is occurring with that configuration on Pop!_OS.