I think it depends on the version of Maya that you are runing, in Maya 5 I bet Hardware render can do that (don't know the details though). In Maya 4.5 this is what you do:

1. Click "Window>Rendering Editors>Hardware Render Buffer..."

2. In the window that pops up click "Render>Attribues..."

3. In the Attribute Editor, under "Render Modes" for "Draw Style" chose "Wireframe".

4. Then back to the Hardware Render Buffer window, click "Render>Test render".

And there you go. Nos just experiment with different options in the attributes (to change the background color for example, or antialiasing)

The instructions for Maya 5 are probably very similar, I don't know...