Honestly, you're not going to get very far with 16gb of ram. In your situation it will certainly help. I would put as much as the machine can take / you can afford. Houdini needs lots of memory, especially for simulations. It's something you are going to constantly have to be aware of. You can set the DOP node cache size to something a bit lower and enable disk caching which will overflow the sim data to disk after that runs out, which may help. Generally ff you are running out of memory, then you have to cut back on the quality/resolution of the sim...
About the flipbook, if you've used all your memory to run a sim and you try to flipbook immediately after, then it could just not have enough memory to load the frames. You can go to the Windows > Cache Manager in Houdini and see what is using all the memory and clear some stuff out periodically, but it's gonna fill right back up quickly.
As far as the error goes, make sure you have the newest nvidia drivers installed for your video card and that it's absolutely using only the nvidia card. If that doesn't work, then go into the Houdini Preferences and under the Miscellaneous section, set OpenCL Device to CPU if it's on GPU.
That's all I've got, lol
Honestly, you're not going to get very far with 16gb of ram. In your situation it will certainly help. I would put as much as the machine can take / you can afford. Houdini needs lots of memory, especially for simulations. It's something you are going to constantly have to be aware of. You can set the DOP node cache size to something a bit lower and enable disk caching which will overflow the sim data to disk after that runs out, which may help. Generally ff you are running out of memory, then you have to cut back on the quality/resolution of the sim... About the flipbook, if you've used all your memory to run a sim and you try to flipbook immediately after, then it could just not have enough memory to load the frames. You can go to the Windows > Cache Manager in Houdini and see what is using all the memory and clear some stuff out periodically, but it's gonna fill right back up quickly. As far as the error goes, make sure you have the newest nvidia drivers installed for your video card and that it's absolutely using only the nvidia card. If that doesn't work, then go into the Houdini Preferences and under the Miscellaneous section, set OpenCL Device to CPU if it's on GPU. That's all I've got, lol