Hello!
I haven't seen a resource that benchmarks the calculation speed of graphics cards in Houdini so I thought I'd post this. I hope that people can participate and post their scores using their gaming/workstation graphics cards so other people can get a rough idea of the performance of each graphics card in Houdini before they decide to buy/upgrade anything. This should only take a few minutes -
1. Start Houdini
2. Use the following units under your Hip File Options -
Unit Length - 1
Unit Mass - 1
3. Frame Range 1-240 @ 24fps
4. Add a sphere at origin
5. Goto the Pyro FX shelf tool and select Explosion. Select the sphere.
6. Disable Cache Simulation in your DOP and use the following settings -
Pyro Container Settings
Division size - 0.075
Size - 7.5, 10, 7.5
Center - 0, 4, 0
Resize Container Settings
Padding 0.3
Subtract Threshold 0.2
9. Select the Pyrosolver. In the Advanced tab, turn on OpenCL
10. Save the file and restart your computer
11. Use a stopwatch or http://www.online-stopwatch.com/ to keep track of the time
12. Open the file, start the sim and the stopwatch timer
13. Record the time after 240 frames.
14. Run the same sim again but with OpenCL disabled
15. Post the exact times with your PC Specs, Houdini version and OS in the following format (using my results as an example) -
Houdini Version - 14.0.201.13
OS - Windows 7 Ultimate x64
GFX - Zotac 770GTX Amp! Edition (2GB) / Driver - 347.09
Time - 1:37.222
CPU - Intel i7 3770K @ stock
Time - 2:09.503
Other - ASRock z77 Pro3 Motherboard, 32 GB Corsair Vengeance RAM
Thank you!
PS - I've attached a hip file with the above settings using Houdini 14 that you can run right away. Thanks for the suggestion, Skybar.
OpenCL_TestFile.hipnc