Hi, since there have been many posts about how houdini performs in xxx videocard or should I buy ram vs. better motherboard, I feel I would ask the question a bit differently so that I can get my information in a more abstract fashion (and use this to make my decision).

In Houdini, what are the noticeable benefits/improvements (i.e. faster cooking, better realitme shaders, etc.) from:

- Having a High End video card (GPU power)?

- Having a large amount of Video RAM?

- Having a large amount of RAM?

- Having a very fast hard drive? (i.e. SSD)

- Having powerful processors (CPU power)?


Anything that I know about this is purely based on assumptions/google searches, so I though I would start a post collecting the information in this manner

Thank you in advance !

ram:
-high amount of particles / fluid, happens that i have my ram going up to 32 GB on certain frame

fast drive:
-read and right cached data faster

processor:
-simulation calculation/mainly anything you cook
-render time
…i felt disabling multi-threading on my CPU accelerated simulations

GPU:
-amount of data you can preview without having an awful view port frame rate.
-number of textures.
-pyro uses open-cl, so a good card might make your pyro simulation faster

-What i do to understand what process does what,
is to open the task manager when i operate in Houdini and
check the impact of what am doing on ram and CPU

-this list is incomplete but that is what i know.

i am like you i took me a while to gather that kind of info.

hope it helps

thank you! that helps a lot. funny thing is that my vid card just died, so I think video card will have to be LOL

I may have to consider a full computer upgrade soon. My mobo only allows for 8 GB ram total… ouch

When it comes to CPUs, there are actually two important factors - top turbo (single core) speed, and number of cores. Single core performance is still very important in Houdini, as much of Houdini is still single-threaded, and some of it will always be by necessity. The ability to clock up to nearly 4GHz is pretty important in these scenarios. In contrast, lots of cores are important for rendering and simulation, and will become more important as Houdini continually evolves. So while a slower, 8-core Xeon might be great for rendering, a 6-core socket 2011 CPU may be a better choice for a workstation, balancing strong single threaded performance with good parallelism.

An SSD is really nice for a system drive(200-250GB), but it's still pretty expensive to get an SSD of reasonable size for production scenes and data (2TB+). On Linux at least, adding oodles of RAM will cache files in “unused” memory, offsetting the latency of hard drives. So, if you can afford 32GB+ RAM, you can use it for both large sims and disk caching. I believe Windows caches files in RAM too, but it doesn't seem quite as effective as Linux.

In terms of a GPU, shoot for 2GB+ of VRAM on the card. It'll allow for large datasets in the viewport and decent-sized OpenCL sims. A Quadro K5000 is a solid performer, but if that's too rich for you, a 660GTX Ti, 670GTX or 680GTX will perform very well too.

Thank you for the tips man I think my next item in line will be a new processor/mobo. As it is also holding me from upgrading my ram. For the vid card I was able to get a gtx650 ti w 2 gb at a very decent price (A huge jump from my ultra 8800!)

Btw does houdini take advantage from dual videocard configurations?

Thanks again!

Houdini doesn't use dual cards directly, though you can assign an OpenCL sim to the secondary card (the one not driving the display). This will prevent the sim from tossing geometry and textures from VRAM if it starts using tons of VRAM, which would cause stuttering. Useful if you have another card lying around, but personally I wouldn't go out and buy one for that purpose unless it consistently occurs.

I need advice on which storage to get: SSD or WD Black. SSD sure is fast but I'm thinking twice on the size. So far, particles sim projects that I write out are around 50gb. I have yet to learn fluid and geo. I'm only looking at shots around 7 sec. More on education/exploration.

I currently have an SSD for OS/system and WD Green and 32gb of ram. With the addition of SSD or WD Black how would you work on the setup? Where do you write out geo or cache disk or keep project files.

THank you