brians

blakshep
I also noticed since karma xpu seems not read primvars, but still would be cool to able to use expressions for filenames somehow

This is a common request.
eg
https://www.sidefx.com/forum/topic/86748/ [www.sidefx.com]

String primvars are not working XPU yet, but we do have it planned.

In the meantime there are alternatives...
- use UDIMS (a float-primvar can be used to offset the UV coordinate, or order to choose what texture you want)
- have multiple texture/image nodes in the scene, and use a switch node to choose the result. (ie you'd have an integer primvar to select what texture you want)

Are you running this in IPR mode?
Or an offline render (eg Husk?)

If you're able to run in IPR mode, can you look in the top-right corner of the screen?
Do you see the device readouts?
Something like the attached image

do you see "Optix" or "EmbreeCPU" in there somewhere? If so, then XPU is at least running.

If XPU is running
- If you see "Optix" with anything other than "fail" beside it, then GPU is in use.
- If there is no "Optix" (ie only EmbreeCPU) then XPU has failed to access the GPU.
- If there is an "Optix" and it has "fail" beside it, then some error has happened.


ps: what version of driver does the machine have? minimum for XPU is 495.89

Here are the XPU docs
https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/solaris/karma_xpu.html [www.sidefx.com]

"...On startup, Karma XPU must compile shaders into device-specific formats. This process will cause the XPU to pause/stutter when you load a new scene or enable a new feature. The compiled results are cached, so rendering the same scene will not pause for shader compilation after the first time...

Do there is not much that can be done to further improve your experience with H19.5
But I can say that in upcoming versions of houdini, shader compile times for interactively editing nodegraphs will be faster.