yeah, i wasn't talking about IPR. Perhaps knowing a bit more about mental ray is your cheaper/better alternative. Besides, are you rendering passes and compositing? or do you just rely on a primary render from maya? This is all dependent on your workflow/pipeline. I render in mental ray/renderman and output passes which are comped in Nuke. This is the process and it'll take a similar amount of time regardless of the renderer. So for me the difference is, do i want 3D motion blur or vector blur? can i raytrace shadows? can i render with displacement or do i have to use bump? how much memory are my frames using. etc etc so in a way it makes no difference. Okay, time to spill out the beans honestdom. If not IPR then what other alternative that works as preview in Maya? The idea was always to render in passes to comp later even when I first had the idea for my tiny short anim. I am thinking to render all in passes and comp in Toxik (Composite). What I have in mind, it will have some blur sequences. I don't know Nuke but again the whole world says is best composite out there, but is hell expensive. Peraphs I could get an EDU version later. What I know about compositing is not much, enough to comp very simple animated frames, retoscopy and so on, but all very basic things as I'm still digging it. DT has been my best friend in this area lately for that. I will still download the demo when is available and try it out, but any opinions are always great to hear. I'm running win7pro, 16gb rams with GTX 560 Ti 1Gb, dual monitors. So for this spec, I'm thinking more to use Normals / Bump maps for the majority of the scenes if not all.