danny-thanks for the support and attempts to keep this where it should be. I had a much different response lined up, but waited a while to cool off.

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Back on track. The following links are interesting to me and give me pause for future Maya and platform considerations.

https://renderman.pixar.com/products...er_mac_G5.html

https://www.apple.com/pr/library/2003/jun/23quotes.html

That's pretty compelling.

It seems from this information that properly optimized 3D software can run quite well on the G5s. Maybe even exceptionally well. Maybe.

All I'm wondering is from a technical curiosity POV where the "problem" lies. I know people here don't necessarily have precise answers, but some may (and have shown) insight for conversation.

Outside of rendering, the three Macs I"ve tested PLE on have been amazing. Ultra-stable, I think I only crashed it once. Very fast in general editing and previewing. Things do slow down with big poly counts, but I assume that's normal. I'm not sure at what point I should expect slowdown. Those trees at denfo.net seem to be quite demanding. Does anyone have any info on what kind of on-screen poly counts one should expect for good performance? I know, such a vague question.

I am anxious to see the next substantial Maya update. I just can't comprehend why Alias would drop millions of dollars (that's my understanding anyway of how much they spent) to convert Maya to OS X only to watch it fizzle. That just makes no sense. Should Alias be able to provide parity in performance (relative to CPU, of course), they would have a ridiculously faithful audience and I'd be one of them.