2. Significant Speed Upgrades

The interface’s response time is much quicker than earlier versions. You can edit complex geometry in almost real-time.

Don’t take my word for it. Rather than hearing me blather on, check out this speed comparison video at Autodesk:

Max9 offers a substantial increase in speed and productivity, thanks to the recompilation. Most of my stuff is low-poly, but I still noticed greater interactivity/response when moving around geometry with a total vertex count of 6,000. As you can see from the video link, you’re getting stuff done in V9 during the idle time that it would take to do a simple redraw/update via a vertex selection in V8.

I also noticed significant speed increases between V8/V9 when editing meshes with low poly/vertex counts and "scrubbing" through animation windows. You can choose between high/low quality viewport textures with a corresponding speed/quality tradeoff.

Plugin Migration

While the default toolkit has been upgraded substantially, many users still rely on third-party plugins for their production process. Plugin consumers have long complained about how each upgrade of Max can require an upgrade of their old plugins, as they won’t work with the new release. I’m sorry to report this is the case with V9; older plugins must be recompiled entirely because of changes made to the platform and architecture.

Some plugin manufacturers like Cebas are offering a small recompilation fee for many of their plugins; others will require a standard upgrade fee in order to work with V9.