Maya’s software renderer is an advanced, multi-threaded renderer. It is based on a rendering technology that is built directly into Maya's dependency graph architecture, which means its feature nodes can be intimately connected with any other feature in Maya. It provides artists with an excellent general purpose rendering solution with very broad capabilities.

It is a hybrid renderer, offering true raytracing plus the speed advantages of a scan-line renderer. The Maya software renderer, while not slow, tends to favor quality and wide breadth of capability over raw speed.

The Maya software renderer supports all of the various entity types found within Maya including particles, various geometry and paint effects (as a post render process) and fluid effects. It also has a robust API for the addition of customer-programmed effects.

The Maya software renderer features IPR (Interactive Photo Realistic rendering), a tool designed to allow you to make interactive adjustments to the final rendered image, and which greatly enhances rendering productivity. Most importantly, the nature of Maya's integrated architecture allows complex interconnections, like procedural textures and ramps that govern particle emission and other unpredictable relationships that are capable of producing stunning visual effects.