www.design-engine.com/alias/

Start by looking at the Qualification Charts on the AW website at www.aliaswavefront.com. Find the Maya and Studio charts in the Community under "Support". These charts list what AW certifies will work correctly.

To get the minimum usable performance I personally wouldn't go below an Intel Pentium III 500 MHz (or equivalent AMD Athlon) with 256 MB RAM with any graphics card from the qual charts. Hard drive size/speed, memory speed, all those things matter, but not nearly as much as the cpu speed, ram amount, and graphics card choice.

If you work in shaded mode with lots of surfaces, textures, lights, or use Maya Artisan or Paint Effects, get a really fast graphics card. If you do some really heavy duty NURBS modeling, where you like to change the shape a lot to see different forms, then get a fast graphics processor. If you have heavy models, get lots of RAM, or if you like to raytrace really huge renderings. If you employ history and use square, rail, and round/fillet a lot, then you'll want a fast cpu.

http://www.sgi.com/products/remanufactured/
http://www.workstationusers.com/
http://www.xsnet.com/

If you're looking for Intel, check here:

boxx, dell, hp, ibm

Graphics Cards

For a Unix station from SGI, Sun, or HP, you can find performance and prices fairly easily on the manufacturers' sites. But with Windows NT/2000, the field is wide open, especially in graphics cards. A|W doesn't report performance numbers because they want to stay friends with all the hardware manufacturers, but there are plenty of third parties providing benchmark information on the web. One easy starting point is www.specbench.org, which publishes the performance results from its own benchmark tests. Other sites such as www.adandtech.com and www.tomshardware.com provide good reviews and links.

Choice of graphics card on a PC makes a huge difference in performance and compatibility. I cannot stress this enough: look at the Qual Charts and configure the correct driver version to the correct settings! If a newer driver version is available, sometimes it will be better, sometimes it may introduce new bugs. Note that sometimes you don't really have a choice, especially if your company only buys from Dell and Dell only sells the nVidia or Wildcat, so this whole section may be irrelevant to you.

One important element in knowing the market is knowing what company made the actual graphics chips on the card. Here's a breakdown of the "families" of chips out there under different market names.

You're treading on thin ice there. The core problem is that Maya and Studio depend on many features of OpenGL that aren't implemented completely in the entry level 3d cards. Try before you buy if possible.


author Sam Weisbard Chicago-based Studio/Maya consultant for training and production work sweisbard@attbi.com special thanks to Design Engine for hosting these pages.		Recommended hardware to run Alias\|Wavefront software. 12.13.02 Start by looking at the Qualification Charts on the AW website at www.aliaswavefront.com. Find the Maya and Studio charts in the Community under "Support". These charts list what AW certifies will work correctly. Which hardware parts are most important? To get the minimum usable performance I personally wouldn't go below an Intel Pentium III 500 MHz (or equivalent AMD Athlon) with 256 MB RAM with any graphics card from the qual charts. Hard drive size/speed, memory speed, all those things matter, but not nearly as much as the cpu speed, ram amount, and graphics card choice. If you work in shaded mode with lots of surfaces, textures, lights, or use Maya Artisan or Paint Effects, get a really fast graphics card. If you do some really heavy duty NURBS modeling, where you like to change the shape a lot to see different forms, then get a fast graphics processor. If you have heavy models, get lots of RAM, or if you like to raytrace really huge renderings. If you employ history and use square, rail, and round/fillet a lot, then you'll want a fast cpu. If you're looking for old SGI IRIX stuff, these places have them: http://www.mce.com/ http://www.pacificexp.com/ http://www.recurrent.com/ http://www.sgi.com/products/remanufactured/ http://www.workstationusers.com/ http://www.xsnet.com/ If you're looking for Intel, check here: boxx, dell, hp, ibm Graphics Cards For a Unix station from SGI, Sun, or HP, you can find performance and prices fairly easily on the manufacturers' sites. But with Windows NT/2000, the field is wide open, especially in graphics cards. A\|W doesn't report performance numbers because they want to stay friends with all the hardware manufacturers, but there are plenty of third parties providing benchmark information on the web. One easy starting point is www.specbench.org, which publishes the performance results from its own benchmark tests. Other sites such as www.adandtech.com and www.tomshardware.com provide good reviews and links. Choice of graphics card on a PC makes a huge difference in performance and compatibility. I cannot stress this enough: look at the Qual Charts and configure the correct driver version to the correct settings! If a newer driver version is available, sometimes it will be better, sometimes it may introduce new bugs. Note that sometimes you don't really have a choice, especially if your company only buys from Dell and Dell only sells the nVidia or Wildcat, so this whole section may be irrelevant to you. One important element in knowing the market is knowing what company made the actual graphics chips on the card. Here's a breakdown of the "families" of chips out there under different market names. 3Dlabs "Oxygen" and "Wildcat/Wildcat VP" ATI "FireGL" new versions are based on the Radeon 9700 chip nVidia "GeForce" and "Quadro" What about the cards not on the Qual Charts? You're treading on thin ice there. The core problem is that Maya and Studio depend on many features of OpenGL that aren't implemented completely in the entry level 3d cards. Try before you buy if possible.

this site is not connected to Alias\|Wavefront or SGI (Silicon Graphics, Inc.)