As someone who spent quite some time (>1000hr) in Houdini, I really wonder what's the secret behind Blender's rendering engines and why SideFX failed to catch up. Cycles are so much faster than Karma on my machine. Eevee can get impressive results in real time while Houdini's real time viewport is bare bone.
They've been investing heavily into this over the last 2 releases, but it's just that SideFX is a really small company. I think they have 50 people or so right now. Karma is way more accurate than Cycles, but slow. Karma XPU is a mixed bag.
The question is why don’t they integrate cycles? I mean I have a random app for home planning on macOS and even that comes with Cycles as the rendering engine. Can’t be that hard.
Cycles is getting direct code contributions from all major hardware vendors.
The thing is, Cycles is fully open sourced... so there is no real secret behind it!
Interesting, maybe major customers are insisting on other features ?
I suppose that's the main reason as Houdini's real customers are those who can afford huge render farms. Even before Karma, Houdini's renderer (Mantra) wasn't known for its speed.
That's quite a bummer for me, an indie user. With the foundation Houdini has established, they probably could've released a real time viewport composition before Blender. But at the end of the day it doesn't make a lot of business sense for SideFX to care about users like me.