SideFX Houdini 21's System Requirements Analysis - Part 1: Background, Benchmarks and Objectivity
In my quest to provide hardware guidance to users, these are my first impressions about Houdini 21's System Requirements and CavalryHQ's recommendations to go from Minimum to Useful to Unleashed!
Background
At Siggraph 2025 in Vancouver, BC, SideFX launched Houdini 21! The latest version of an application that changed and continues to push the industry forward when it comes to procedural 3D animation, including state-of-the-art fluid and particle simulations.
“Houdini is built from the ground up to be a procedural system that empowers artists to work freely, create multiple iterations and rapidly share workflows with colleagues” — Sidefx.com
How important is Houdini in the Media & Entertainment industry? according to the State of 3D 2024 survey by Poliigon.com1, Houdini is an absolute beast:
Houdini has the widest usage across Media and Entertainment, including animation, advertising, Games & VFX, but obviously the largest userbase in VFX
When asked: “How well does the 3D software meet your needs?” Houdini scored at the top of all other applications and very close to Extremely Well
Regarding User Experience, Houdini won top spots in Stability and Performance
For Developers, Houdini took the top spot in both Speed of Development and Confidence in Developers
When users were asked about which M&E sub-industry this software is best suited for, Houdini also took the combined top spot, including (cumulatively) Animation, Advertising, Games and VFX
So Houdini, is useful, fast, stable, SideFX listens to their users, etc. Does it have any weaknesses? Well, not many. In fact, the only area where Houdini scored last was Ease of Learning, and I get it, it’s a very powerful and complex tool. Having said that, I can see that SideFX is taking action, with tons of learning resources, most of them free and providing a platform for experts to sell courses, right on the Learn tab at the top of SideFx.com. Also, SideFX just launched a contest to promote How To - Tutorials from experts. Contest goes from Oct 2025 to Jan 2026. For more information, visit: https://www.sidefx.com/community-main-menu/contests-jams/how-to-contest/
Update: Poliigon’s State of 3D 20252 report came out while I was writing this article, and no surprise, Houdini is still scoring very high in all categories, so I see no statistical need to write this section again, having said that, go to Poliigon and check it out! There are new questions around AI usage, demographics, salaries and more!
With New software, comes New Systems Requirements
I’m sure Peter Parker says that in at least one of the multiverses.
What kind of system do you need to run Houdini 21? Answering this question for any application from any Software Vendor (ISV) should be as easy as sending you to their website, but if you browse my previous articles, it’s never as easy as it sounds.
If you want to dig deeper, I recommend reading:
In Houdini 21’s case, these are their System Requirements:
sidefx.com/Support/system-requirements/
As I argue on the article above, these pages need some help, sometimes to bring obsolete hardware specs to the present or at least to this decade. So let’s see how well SideFX did with Houdini 21’s System Requirements and let this be a useful article to facilitate the journey of any Houdini user that want to answer not only questions like:
Can I run Houdini 21 on my current PC? The answer is yes, unless your system is like older than ~10 years old. But we are not here to make a cube and simulate less particles than what you can find in the air of a semiconductor fab, are we? (Those fabs are really clean… get it? Nevermind, let’s move on)
We want to know more useful things like:
Is my current PC ideal for Houdini 21?
What am I missing if I run Houdini 21 on my current PC vs a state-of-art PC/Workstation?
What workstation should I buy to run Houdini 21 at all its glory?
Benchmarks and Objectivity
In order to make objective (please read: data driven) recommendations and not subjective ones (please read: educated opinions), we would need a good Houdini benchmark and a lot of data.
There are no official benchmarks for Houdini, and the only one I have seen from the community a this benchmark created by VFX Arabia3. I applaud their contributions bringing industry expertise for the benefit of all Houdini users! Some other day we can double down on this benchmark, like I digged on PxF Nukebench for Foundry Nuke on the article below, but that’s a topic for another day.
Today we are analyzing SideFX’s System Recommendations and making sense of them, so let’s get into it.
SideFX Houdini 21 Official System Recommendations
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About the Author
This article was written by Hernán Quijano, Workstation Performance and Market Analyst at CavalryHQ. Our mission is to bridge the workstation industry and power users; improving guidance and removing technical roadblocks, so users unleash their talents focusing on accelerating software applications and workflows in Engineering, Media & Entertainment and A.I.
Disclaimers
Unless explicitly stated, this article has not been sponsored by any brand or organization | The author might personally own stock in one or multiple of the mentioned companies.
References:
https://www.poliigon.com/articles/state-of-3d-2024
https://www.poliigon.com/state-of-3d
https://www.vfxarabia.co/post/houdini-benchmark-cores-vs-clockspeed-updated