I'm trying to determine which operating system Houdini performs best under. I know it has been running on Windows and Linux the longest, so those are pretty much the contenders. Does anyone know?

I purchased a copy of winXP SP3 32bit to remain compatible with my old copy of 3ds max 6 w/ brazil, but I was very interested in moving to openSUSE 64bit.

Between WinXP64 and openSUSE 64, any guesses?

I regard linux as the best for performance, but then it depends on what you are doing. If it's just learning then the OS performance won't be much difference.

Since I have to stay aware of how the different OS's behave I'm using Virtualbox to run Winxp and others inside Ubuntu Linux. Works great and I don't see too much of a hit when running houdini on winxp in ubuntu.
Now if someone would only figure out how to get OSX running in Virtualbox I'd be all set.

I don't know about Linux, but I hear a lot of good things with regard to performance. But if you at talking windows the x64 over x32 is a quantum leap, just for the extra memory usage. If you are doing anything heavy then H9.5 on x64 with multiple cores and 8Gb Ram rocks.

Holosynthetic
I'm trying to determine which operating system Houdini performs best under.

Unquestionably Linux, preferably x64, advisably gcc 4.2.

Just to add a ‘me too’ to the linux camp…

I run windows XP64 myself, but there is no question that linux is the way to go if you are looking for performance – others have mentioned access to all the RAM available in the 64 bit builds, but one mustn't forget the NFS disk access speed which blows windows out of the water.

Then again, it doesn't much matter if you are doing tutorials or just learning.
Last thing you need to add to the complex task of learning houdini, is another complex task of becoming a linux admin.

G

SYmek
Unquestionably Linux, preferably x64, advisably gcc 4.2.

The gcc 4.2 build says the Debian distro, is this compatible with openSUSE as well? while I ask this, are all linux builds interchangeably compatible with one another?

keyframe
Last thing you need to add to the complex task of learning houdini, is another complex task of becoming a linux admin.

I figured I'd make it hard on myself and learn everything at once instead of baby steps, I have to put up or shut up.

I figured I'd make it hard on myself

Why would you wanna do that?

G

Unfortunately, I cannot completely agree.

I'm running Houdini on Linux at work. I have not run it under windows for a while. However with other software, most notably Radiance (a monte carlo ray tracer, so very processor intensive not so much i/o), I did do testing.

This was several years ago, but porting from linux to windows, I got a 20% speed increase just from moving to windows. I guess Microsoft makes a pretty good compiler. Then switching to the intel compiler gave me another 10% increase.

In general I have found that programs run faster under windows than they do under Linux.

I suspect the compiler is the main cause. Most linux programs are compiled using gcc, where most windows programs are compiled using microsoft's or intels (closed source) compilers, it would seem probable they optimize very aggressively towards their own products.

Perhaps somebody has more recent test? Mantra would be a good candidate.

Cheers,
Koen

keyframe

I figured I'd make it hard on myself

Why would you wanna do that?

A lot of the job postings within the visual effects industry prefer Linux knowledge. I figure it would be better to learn now than wait till a later point. Also I am building my first computer after being OSX based for quite some time. I would rather invest time in Linux than have to install windows, even though I picked up a copy to handle legacy software that I own.

Definitely Linux 64, I agree with Symek.

For rendering, IMO any compiler optimization is drowned by the underlying OS's I/O performance (for textures, caches, archives), and in this regard, my tests suggest that Ubuntu64 (the linux we use) is roughly about 10% quicker than windows 64 - on the same hardware (8-core with tons of memory) and accessing a samba share.

This is all just empirical evidence of course.

As for actually interacting with the software (as opposed to rendering), in my experience the openGL driver quality is much better in Linux for at least nvidia cards. This is really important since Houdini (moreso than other 3d software) uses openGL for nearly everything in its UI.

Just my 2c
cheers,
Abdelkareem

koen
This was several years ago, but porting from linux to windows, I got a 20% speed increase just from moving to windows. I guess Microsoft makes a pretty good compiler. Then switching to the intel compiler gave me another 10% increase.

gcc's optimization abilities was greatly enhanced in gcc 4.X so this will depend on which gcc version you used. As others have mentioned Windows (I use WinXP x64 as my main machine) is definitely slower in I/O than Linux. So that wouldn't have shown up on your ray tracer port. Windows is not just slower with disk accesses, but also over the network. I get like 5X faster scp speeds on Linux than on WinXP x64.

BTW, I just looked at this page:
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vcgeneral/thread/b992fdcc-5ad0-4ae7-b5d6-5bd49eb7e8dc/ [social.msdn.microsoft.com]
It appears that gcc 4.3 optimization performance is now about on par with Visual C++ 2008.

It was a few years ago, definitely not with the 4.* compiler. Good to hear big improvement where made.

Cheers,
Koen