Qualification of Maya 8.5 on Mac OS X

Last updated: March 7th, 2007

• General Configuration
• Information for specific Mac OS X versions
• System and Graphics
• Detailed Driver Notes
• Compiler Requirements

General Configuration

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 official Apple-supplied graphics driver. See the following sections.

As well, you must meet other requirements such as:

• At least 512 MB of RAM (more is recommended).
• an Ethernet network card, or hardware dongle (for product licensing). Customers intending to license their Alias software based on an external network card should be aware that Alias does not support the use of these devices and cannot guarantee that software will operate correctly when licensed in this way.
• A three button mouse (strongly recommended).

General disclaimers:

• The configurations shown are subject to change, and additional qualified configurations may be added after qualification testing has been carried out.
• The operating system specified is the OS used for the qualification process. While it may be possible to use Maya successfully on earlier or later versions of Mac OS X, Autodesk cannot guarantee the performance or behavior. 
• 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 Alias Support services guidelines.
• 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.
• 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. Alias 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.

Information for specific Mac OS X versions

How to tell which version of Mac OS X is installed: Select "About this Mac" in the Apple menu. The general OS version number will be just below the logo; e.g., Version 10.4.8.
To find the precise build number, click the version text. It will change to the build number; e.g., Build 8I125. (Occasionally Apple will release slightly different Versions with the same version number but which may behave differently. It may only be possible to identify the OS version by the build number.)

System and Graphics

• Maya 8.5 is qualified on any of the systems identified below using the version of Mac OS X specified above (under Information for specific Mac OS X versions). Do not assume that newer versions of Mac OS X will be suitable for use with Maya.
• You may need to refer to Apple's Support site to identify your system.
• If you intend to run dual monitors, see note below.

* All Macs with built in Flat Panels (iMacs and PowerBooks) are limited to built-in screen resolutions. These resolutions may limit the use of Maya; for example, menu bars may not be fully drawn and windows may need screen resolution that is not available. Using an external monitor and setting the resolution to 1280 x 1024 allows full use of Maya menus and windows.

Detailed Driver Notes

All qualifications are performed using only the official Apple default drivers that are included with a particular version of an OS (e.g., 10.4) or OS update (e.g., 10.4.8). Drivers acquired by any other means; e.g., directly from a graphics vendor, are considered unsupported and therefore not qualified. We cannot guarantee the stability of Maya using unsupported drivers. We have received numerous reports of problems with drivers other than those released by Apple as part of the OS.

How to verify which version of a video driver is installed on your Mac OS X system: In a Finder window, navigate to /System/Library/Extensions/(vendor extension file). With this file selected, choose File -> Info to view the version information.

For example, to determine the version of the video driver installed for the Nvidia GeForce FX 6800 Ultra, select the /System/Library/Extensions/NVDANV40Hals.kext file and then choose File -> Info.

General notes about Graphics Cards

• The texture placement manipulator may not display. The manipulator can be forced to display by clicking the middle mouse button anywhere in the same window.
• The Alpha Gain Slider in the attribute editor for an image plane does not alter the transparency of the image plane, or the alpha gain is displayed incorrectly
• The outline of the Paint Effects brushes or artisan brushes (e.g. sculpt) may remain on screen on the completion of a stroke, or may not be drawn at all, or may draw incorrectly.
• Refresh of scenes containing Paint Effects can be very slow, or may 'flash' during redraw.
• Hardware shadows cannot be displayed (Lighting->Shadows in pane menus)

Dual monitor support

• Apple systems can be run in Dual Monitor configuration by using a single graphics card which supports dual output (e.g. Nvidia GeForce 6800 or ATI Radeon x850xt).

ATI Radeon x850xt (G5)

ATI Radeon x800xt (G5)

ATI Radeon 9600/9800 (RV based Cards) (G5)

Quadro FX 4500 (PCI Express G5)

Nvidia 6600  (PCI Express G5)

Nvidia 7800 GT (PCI Express G5)

ATI Radeon X1900XT - Retail (PCI Express G5)

ATI Radeon X1900XT (Mac Pro)

Quadro FX 4500 (Mac Pro)

Nvidia 7300 GT (Mac Pro)

Compiler Requirements

If you are building plug-ins for Maya, note that the Maya API requires a specific compiler and linker, on each of the platforms Autodesk supports in order to build compatible plug-ins. Maya 8.5 is built on: Mac OS X 10.4 with the XCode version 2.2 using the gcc 4.0.1 compiler. Using this compiler will guarantee binary compatibility when building plug-ins.  The specific compiler version is gcc version 4.0.1 (Apple Computer, Inc. build 5247).