Though the box looks the same, Maya 6.5 has made various improvements over Maya 6. All images © Alias Systems Inc.

Recently, Alias released a new revision to the Maya product line, bringing it to version 6.5 in both the Unlimited and Complete packages (the last upgrade for IRIX and intended to handle “very large datasets”), while leaving the Personal Learning Edition (PLE) at version 6.0. This new release has been greeted with mixed responses from the 3D community for a variety of reasons and I hope to shed some light on them in this review.

Looking on the Alias website at the list of improvements for this release, you will find that a large percentage of the changes are “performance optimizations.” The list of enhancements seemed underwhelming so I loaded Maya 6.5 on two machines, each containing Maya 6.0 and 6.5. Since many of these improvements are speed-based, I thought that I would do my own speed checks. I am no benchmark-techie, but I figured if this upgrade was primarily speed boosts…it would be noticeable to the typical user. The two test machines were a homemade dual 2 gigahertz Athlon with 2 gigs of ram and an NVIDIA FX Quadro 900 and a Dell M60 with a 1.6 gigahertz P4M with 512 megabytes of ram and an NVIDIA Quadro FX Go700.

I tested many of the improvements, including general viewport workflow, vertex painting, editing polygonal objects that contain vertex painting, soft modification of high poly models, subdivision surface editing and many others.

In general, I found no noticeable improvements over performance on either machine when using the same files in Maya 6.0 and 6.5. There were, however, some cases where these speed improvements were noticeable. Here are some of those cases:

When increasing a setting, Maya 6.5 has a quicker redraw and viewport interactivity.