I finally made the effort to purchase the ATI Radeon HD 4870.

So far, it has totally eliminated the crashes and Maya runs quite smoothly, even though the card is not officially supported by Apple...

I use the Mac Pro 1,1 model and I have heard from many people that the Radeon HD 4870 works fine on these models.

The other option for my computer is to purchase the nVIDIA Quadro FX, but this...

It actually turns out that the crashes are still coming back. Darn.

The good news, however, is that I am purchasing a new card -

the ATI Radeon HD 4870.

Hopefully this card will take care of...

I installed the Service Pack a1 for both Maya and the mental ray satellite. So far, it seems like this has solved the crashing problem (hopefully). I will try to post a log file if Maya does happen...

I just pulled up my system.log file of the last time Maya crashed:

Nov 23 13:53:39 Macintosh kernel[0]: NVDA(OpenGL): Channel exception! status = 0xffff info32 = 0xd = GR: SW Notify Error
Nov 23...

You're correct, I do run a Mac Pro. ;) Well, I ran TechTool Deluxe on it this morning for all the possible tests it offered and they all passed. So it probably could be bad permissions or corrupted...

I looked at the Graphics Hardware Qualification (http://download.autodesk.com/us/qualcharts/2009/Maya2009_qualifiedgraphics_mac.pdf) for my computer and it turns out that my graphics card is...

That sounds like that might be a good idea. Do you have any suggestions for graphics card testing applications that would run on Mac OS X?

Sometimes when I work in Maya, the program freezes not just Maya, but the whole computer itself. When Maya crashes, I have to shut down my computer and turn it on again. This at times can become very...