Autodesk® Maya® 2009 Hardware Qualification
Readme First Last updated: 29 September 2008.
About this Document
The information contained in this document applies to all hardware qualification executed on the Autodesk Maya 2009 software product release and should be acknowledged by all users prior consulting the qualification charts.
General Disclaimers
In order to determine whether your system is qualified to run Maya and mental ray for Maya, you must have a qualified processor, operating system, graphics card, and graphics driver. See the following sections. You must also make sure you system meets the minimum systems requirement for Maya. The configurations shown are subject to change, and additional qualified configurations may be added after qualification testing has been carried out. It may be possible to successfully use Maya with a non-qualified or partially qualified configuration, but support and maintenance programs will be subject to the Autodesk Support services guidelines. Autodesk qualification team doesn't have the bandwidth to qualify all combinations of workstations/laptops and graphics cards on all operating systems. The graphics drivers specified in this document are the drivers that were used for the qualification process. While it may be possible to use Maya successfully on earlier or later drivers, Autodesk cannot guarantee their performance or behavior. Due to the many operating system and architecture differences between the supported platforms, the results of some operations will differ on different platforms. This is most noticeable with operations which iterate to reach their results -- leading to cumulatively large difference -- e.g., dynamics, some rendering. You may not be able to "mix and match" renderings on different platforms. Standard pen pressure sensitivity with Wacom tablets is supported. However, Wacom mice which are used with tablets have significant limitations and cannot be fully integrated with standard navigation in Maya. We recommend using a standard mouse with Maya, and limiting pen usage to Maya's Paint Effects and Sculpting tools. Autodesk is working with Wacom to achieve full support for Wacom products. When texture images are stored on systems remote from the rendering process; depending on network speed, specifications and load it is possible that the renderer may be unable to access a texture file on demand and may 'drop' individual textures on a frame by frame basis. To reduce this occurrence, store textures on a system local to the rendering process.
Important Notes
(1) There are many cards based on GeForce GPU chipsets. NVIDIA and Autodesk do not recommend these cards for use with Maya as you may experience various refresh, display and stability problems and inadequate performance. We suggest you choose from NVIDIA's workstation cards instead, such as the Quadro families which are much better suited to high-end 3D packages such as Maya. Nvidia GeForce VS Quadro White Paper [PDF]
(2) For the same reasons as the ones listed in note (1), ATI and Autodesk do not recommend the use of ATI Radeon GPU chipsets cards.
(3) Video Cards without Hardware Overlay Planes: Using video cards without Hardware Overlay planes (or Hardware Overlay planes turned off) can result in poorperformance for certain operations within Maya including (but not restricted to) use of tools based on Artisan or Paint Textures technology. There will also be visual differences compared with Hardware overlays that may result in difficulty seeing or manipulating aspects of the scene or Maya interface. Examples of Graphics cards without Hardware overlays include (but are not restricted to): ATI Radeon Family, NVIDIA GeForce Family.
(4) For a productive user experience with Maya, it is recommended to use a card which has a minimum of 256MB of video memory.
(5) Autodesk recommends the use of "Span Mode" for Dual Monitor configurations using NVIDIA cards.
Make sure you look at our latest additions to this document, which are: NVIDIA® and ATI™ graphics cards results and caveats.
Graphics Cards & Drivers
The following table lists the graphics cards and driver versions for the Maya 2009 software product release.
Table Legend
Qualified
.
Qualified with caveats. Refer to Caveats & Limitations
Qualification planned. Results coming shortly
Qualification failed due to serious problems
.
Un-tested. No qualification planned – not applicable / not available
Graphics Card & Driver Qualifications for Autodesk Maya 2009 for Windows Windows XP SP2 Windows Vista Business SP1
Graphics Card
Driver
32-bit OS
64-bit OS
32-bit OS
64-bit OS NVIDIA
Quadro® FX 4700x2
v.175.51 Quadro FX 1700
v.169.96 Quadro FX 3700
v.169.96 Quadro FX 4600
v.169.96 Quadro FX 5600
v.169. 96 Quadro FX 1500
v.169. 96 Quadro FX 3500
v.169. 96 Quadro FX 4500
v.169. 96 Quadro FX 4500x2
v.175.51 Quadro FX 5500
v.169.96 GeForce® GPUs
—
. See Note 1 in Readme First ATI
FirePro™ 3D v3700
— FireGL™ v7700
v.8.502
.
.
.Notes on Operating Systems
1. Maya 2009 has not been qualified on Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 3.
2. Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2 (SP2). After installation of Service Pack 2, Maya or its component programs may not launch successfully. If this occurs, you may either unblock the program via the Windows Firewall Security Alert dialogue, or add it as an Exception in the Exceptions Tab in the Windows Firewall dialogue box. For more information, please see the Microsoft Update at: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=842242&product=windowsxpsp2.
3. Autodesk is aware of a problem whereby the system can pause or temporary hang when some of Maya’s toolbar menus are being triggered. Should you encounter this problem, please send a message to me.3d.qualification@autodesk.com.
4. We do not recommend saving data directly from Maya to NFS or Novell Netware or other remote mounted file systems. We have received several reports of data corruption when saving in this method although we have been unable to reproduce this. We strongly recommend that you save the files locally and then copy the data to the mounted storage system.
5. If the Maya tear-off pull-down menus don't display properly on Windows XP with UI schemes, set UI preference to Windows Classic Style. Start > Settings > Control Panel > Display > Windows Classic.
6. It is strongly suggested to select the global presets: “Autodesk Maya” in the global settings under Manage 3D settings in the NVIDIA Control Panel.
7. When installing the ATI FireGL drivers, an Audio driver for HDMI audio output is installed by default, this may cause your current sound configuration to no longer function properly. To avoid this problem, you can either avoid installing the HDMI driver or disable the sound driver in the Device Manager.
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