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Uninstalling Maya

Installing Maya for Windows

Installing Maya for Mac OS X

 

User Guide > General > Installation and Licensing > Installing Maya for Windows > 

Graphics requirements for Maya

To make full use of Maya’s capabilities, you must have a graphics card qualified to run Maya. Please refer to:

www.autodesk.com/qual-charts

As well, options in the Display Properties settings of Windows affect the display performance of Maya. To learn the correct option settings for graphics cards qualified for use with Maya, please check the qualification charts for the latest information.

Some graphics card manufacturers have created an option to optimize Maya display performance which may be available through the Windows Display Properties settings. See your graphics card installation instructions, or contact your graphics card manufacturer to see if their graphics software provides this option.

If you’re using a card that’s not qualified, try setting the following options (some steps offer only general guidelines because each manufacturer has a unique set of display options).

To set your graphics card options

1. Right-click your desktop, select Properties, then select the Settings tab in the Display Properties window.
2. From the Color quality menu, select 24 or 32 bits of color for best color quality in displayed images.
3. Drag the Screen resolution slider to the best display resolution supported by your hardware. The higher you set the display resolution, the more graphics card main memory you need. This is called VRAM on some computers.

   Maya generally works best at 1280 by 1024 resolution. If you’ve selected True Color and your card has limited VRAM, it will work better at a lower resolution. (At the higher resolution, the card may run out of memory, forcing the OpenGL driver to operate in software mode rather than use hardware acceleration.)

To set graphics performance options

After you install your graphics card driver software, it’s likely that a tab named for the card was created in the Display Properties window. The tab has performance options that vary with each card. On Windows XP, click the Advanced button and select the appropriate tab.

The following are general suggestions for setting performance options:

1. In the Display Properties window, click the tab named for your graphics card (if available).
2. Turn on the overlay plane feature (if available).

   Maya takes advantage of the hardware overlay plane feature available with most mid- and high-quality OpenGL graphics cards. In brief, overlay planes enable programs to quickly display certain elements of a user interface that exist on top of other elements, without having to redraw the entire user interface. Overlay planes are called hardware overlays in some products.

   Maya works with four-bit or greater overlay planes, single- or double-buffered. For some graphics cards, overlay planes are available only if you turn off alpha planes operation.

3. Stencil planes are not required by Maya; you can turn them off.
4. Close the Display Properties window.