Noticed the OSX 10.11.2 update was released.

Is it generally recommended to update OSX to El Capitan now to run Houdini 15 on a mac?

Is it better to stay at 10.10.4 or update to 10.11.2?

If you're having graphics issues, ElCap is a good upgrade choice as Apple ties its graphics driver updates to its OS versions and does not update old OSX versions with the new drivers. But otherwise I don't know if there is any benefit.

Yeh stability for the display could be improved. Sounds like 10.11.2 is the way to go.

Just wanted to add to the strange state of play on OsX openGL - Intel is more stable than Nvidia for bone manipulation. Houdini will intermitantly crash grabbing a bone handle on the Gtx980, but is rock solid on the Intel 3000. 10.11.2

Bug ID=72128

Windows is super stable.

I just updated hoping that Alembic performance wouldn't still be in the toilet but it looks like this latest El Cap hasn't solved the issue.

I swapped boxes with another artist, going from a 5820K + 780Ti running Win7 to a Late 2013 Mac Pro, with Xeon and dual FirePro D500 and it has been painful, mainly due to abysmal performance and stability with Alembics, particularly where cameras are concerned.

Lots of double busy pointers at the end of processing the geometry (both stopwatch and beachball) where even my quad-core i7 + 860M GTX laptop would just update the display. And if I save out looking through the Alembic camera I get a fatal crash loading the file again (I'll have to check if this is still the case after updating to the latest El Cap (*)). Rendering with multiple geo samples also induces a crash.

I thought I was safe exporting the camera and lens information to clip files and read these in to a new camera but basically looking at the Alembic geometry through an actual camera, and not a novel perspective view, incurs a wait and lots of busy mouse doing pretty much anything.

In every way this box is an upgrade yet for the first time in more than a decade I'm paranoid at any moment I'm going to get a crash or freeze or just something that takes longer than if I was to just do it on my laptop.

So now I have to wait until we can budget for a new PC build and this “trashcan” will end up being a completely overkill editorial machine

edit: (*) upping geo samples to “2” with alembic geometry turned on still results in a Mantra crash unless I add an Unpack SOP.

pockets
So now I have to wait until we can budget for a new PC build and this “trashcan” will end up being a completely overkill editorial machine

It's frustrating from this side of the table, too. And somewhat baffling. :?

twod
It's frustrating from this side of the table, too. Somewhat baffling too.

Yeah, and it's hard having been an Apple advocate, because from a user experience standpoint I prefer the OS to anything else. This is pretty dynamite hardware too, even if it's a couple years old now, it's still a touch faster on the renders than that 6-core Haswell-E consumer/enthusiast i7.

My youngest brother works for Apple and my mom works for AMD and I get to be the downer at Christmas talking about how their respective companies make my life difficult right now, because neither one takes professional graphics seriously

pockets

twod
…because neither one takes professional graphics seriously

It does seem like Apple is only concerned with consumer portable devices, not their 10% desktop/laptop share. AMD's really stepped up their game with OpenGL lately, I'm hoping that Apple will at some point follow suit. Even just the baby step of supporting the GL_KHR_debug extension would be a big help for developers.

twod
AMD's really stepped up their game with OpenGL lately…

Do you mean for Windows (or linux)? I know on paper I've wanted to go AMD but been gunshy of driver issues. When I spec'd the 5820K + 780Ti I really wanted to get either an r290 or r295x2 for the potential OpenCL boost but blinked and went with the “safe” bet of a fairly fast Nvidia board.

I've held off building another system for at home, instead being temporarily satisfied with my GTX equipped laptop and my eye towards spending discretionary cash on car parts but if I was to build another desktop at home I'd go AMD if I could just feel comfortable with the driver situation.

AMD's been very good at supporting their pro drivers in the past few years on Windows. Linux looks like it's going to get some good support in the near future (http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/12/amd-embraces-open-source-to-take-on-nvidias-gameworks/), [arstechnica.com] which has been a weak point for them. And lately they've been pretty good about responding to our OSX issues, which is still the platform with the most glaring issues.

We've also had substantially less AMD-specific issues over the past few Houdini versions, possibly because of our adoption of core-GL3.2, but also I believe the driver quality has improved.

May I ask if there are any outstanding issues related to the AMD drivers on OSX platform ? I am considering to use Houdini on a new skylake imac using Amd M395x graphic card and ElCapitan. I would like to know if I should expect any known issues on this platform. Thanks.

twod
AMD's been very good at supporting their pro drivers in the past few years on Windows. Linux looks like it's going to get some good support in the near future (http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/12/amd-embraces-open-source-to-take-on-nvidias-gameworks/), [arstechnica.com] which has been a weak point for them. And lately they've been pretty good about responding to our OSX issues, which is still the platform with the most glaring issues.

We've also had substantially less AMD-specific issues over the past few Houdini versions, possibly because of our adoption of core-GL3.2, but also I believe the driver quality has improved.

I'd like to advocate for a dual-boot license whilst OsX OpenGL issue persist. Same license but can be used on OsX / Windows or Linux on the same machine.

RFE #70927

Example 1: Bones are almost not useable in OsX/Nvidia, too many crashes, whilst booting into Windows they work fine, so I'd like to do the bone work there and the rest in OsX where the other apps complete the pipeline.

Thank you for this information Marty. You mention to have these issues on OSX+Nvidia, so would it affect the AMD too ? I have no background information about the bugs and fixes for AMD drivers so I was just wondering. For me using windows is less than ideal so I hope I can get away with using OSX.

MartybNz
I'd like to advocate for a dual-boot license whilst OsX OpenGL issue persist. Same license but can be used on OsX / Windows or Linux on the same machine.

RFE #70927

Example 1: Bones are almost not useable in OsX/Nvidia, too many crashes, whilst booting into Windows they work fine, so I'd like to do the bone work there and the rest in OsX where the other apps complete the pipeline.

At this stage you need someone with that exact machine to test on. Nvidia and AMD have different bugs, and the same vendor but different cards might use different drivers so they could exhibit different bugs!

MartybNz
Just wanted to add to the strange state of play on OsX openGL - Intel is more stable than Nvidia for bone manipulation. Houdini will intermitantly crash grabbing a bone handle on the Gtx980, but is rock solid on the Intel 3000. 10.11.2

Bug ID=72128

Update for this bug - H14 doesn't appear to crash using bones on OsX/GTX 980, tested H15 with HOUDINI_OGL_FAST_BONES=0 but it was still crashing.

I will start testing Houdini on Late 2015 iMac with R395X soon and will report any bugs found.

Fwiw I've hit 99.99% GL stability in OsX 10.11.2 & H15.0.327.

Details are the cMP has an AMD card and a Nvidia card installed. Launching Houdini on the AMD monitor, then using Houdini on the Nvidia monitor gets rid of all the GL bugs :shock: i.e. all bone related bugs are gone and the AMD selection issues do not appear on the Nvidia monitor.

The trick is to set the OsX system monitor ‘Arrangement’ to have the menu bar on the AMD monitor, then in ‘About Houdini’ the OpenGL Vendor is set to ‘ATI Technologies Inc’

AMD 7950, Nvidia Gtx 980.

Sounds pretty much like most of the bizarre workarounds I've had to do for OSX, except mine are in code :?

Glad you found a workable solution. No idea why it works.

Is opencl acceleration still out of question on Mac OSX platform ?