Maya training on Mac, but use PC at work?

[Per-Anders]

can't see why there would be any problems. the interface is the same (except for it's in aqua). of course it'll be complete only, not unlimited. but you shouldn't encounter any signifigant differences.

[ragecgi]

I use Maya UNL. at home on my PC's, and Compl. on a Mac (osx on a brand new box) at work, and the only things that trouble me with having to do that are:

GENERAL:
-Not a whole lot of plugin development for mac

PERSONAL:
-SLOOOOW on a lot of things, as well as general OS "thinking".
(tired of that dam pinwheel! ...any fix for that yet? Apple Sup. says no?? ...yet THEY set it up for us???)
-confusing, and somewhat painfull key command learning-curve. (was for my fingers anyway...hehe...)


So mainly I think, other than a lack of plugins, it would be more of a personal difference than a technical one, so have fun m8!

[mucksmear]

Great!
Thanks for the opinions.
Time to sign up for the class.

-E

[mark_wilkins]

I haven't seen too much freezing up in Maya 5 on my 800 MHz Powerbook G4. In general, it feels like the Mac version of Maya has been significantly improved from earlier versions I've used. Usually this kind of freezing is due to swapping, and it will help to keep the stuff you're running in the background to a minimum, though that may not be a complete solution depending on how much RAM you have and your scenes.

The late-model G4e (used in all the 600 MHz-plus G4 systems), per clock, is not a great processor for double-precision floating-point math, which accounts for most of the general slowness. By comparison, the G5 will spank it by a factor of two at the same clock speed, and by much farther on actual machines with the G5 clocked faster than the G4e. However, the G4 machines compare favorably to many of the platforms I've run Maya on in the past, and I find my current setup quite usable if not the snappiest ever.

Interestingly enough, the G4e's weaknesses in double-precision floating-point are directly due to the allocation of a substantial amount of space on the die for a very efficient AltiVec implementation, which for specially-written code will massively accelerate single-precision floating-point. The G5 implements the same instruction set, and it's still fast, but not nearly as much so. What this means is that if you're running processor-bound AltiVec code on the G4 (which Maya is not) it can be much faster than the G5, but if you're running memory-bound code, or double-precision code, both of which Maya tend to be, the G5 will be significantly faster.

-- Mark

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