New Viewport 2.0 features include improved support for most parts of Maya, for example, manipulators, tools, shapes, and nodes.

Two new performance options are provided: The Vertex Animation Cache option provides more interactive scrubbing of your animation, and the Thread Dependency Graph Evaluation option provides better performance by evaluating separate characters in separate threads.

New API support for plug-in shapes, hardware shaders, and locators is provided. Approximated support in the viewport is provided for mia_material_* shaders and other mental ray shaders. New effects include screen-space ambient occlusion, motion blur, depth of field and multisample anti-aliasing.

In addition, the new Maya Hardware 2.0 renderer allows you to perform command line rendering for Viewport 2.0, or to batch render to disk or to Render View. You can access the Hardware 2.0 renderer from the Render View window, the Render Settings window, the Script Editor, via the command line renderer, or by selecting Render > Batch Render.

• Visualize interactively in Viewport 2.0
• Maya Hardware 2.0 renderer
• Maya Hardware 2.0 Renderer tab
• Renderer > Viewport 2.0
• Watch: New Viewport 2.0 features

You can now easily create render pass nodes through the Hypershade and view the output of these passes directly in the Render View. Furthermore, you can create basic compositing graphs using render passes and standard Maya shading utility nodes, and visualize the result directly in the Render View or a batch render using the new render target node.

• Previewing your composite in the Render View
• Render View menu bar
• Render View toolbar
• mental ray for Maya renderer command line renderer flags
• Render > Batch Render

Connect a vector displacement map to your shading group in Maya to create complex sculpted surfaces with displacement in arbitrary directions; for example, to create undercuts or overhanging features. You can create vector displacement maps in Mudbox or any comparable software.

You can use this feature with any Maya or mental ray shader; however, you cannot visualize vector displacement maps in the scene view, and you must render using mental ray for Maya.

• Connecting a texture as a vector displacement map
• About displacement material
• Watch : Vector displacement maps

Maya 2012 provides you with the ability to preview Ptex textures assigned to any standard Maya shading network texture input in Viewport 2.0.

• Previewing Ptex textures