Autodesk has released Maya 2019 with a list of updated based mainly – as the dev team stated in their blog – on users’ feedback.

In this release one can find:

• Faster animation with Cached Playback feature. This background process is promised to drastically increase the speed of animation playback directly in the viewport.

Cached Playback is turned on by default and put into “Evaluation Mode”, nevertheless the settings can be optimized manually depending on GPU, memory size and personal preferences.

• New UI working environment thanks to Arnold updates in Viewport 2.0.

The Arnold standard surface shader has been improved in Maya 2019 so that what you see in the viewport is a lot closer to the final result you’re going to get from an Arnold render. Illumination and reflections are also real-time in Viewport 2.0.

• Performance improvements that include faster loading of scenes that have MetaData, faster loading and interaction for scenes with hidden objects, faster material and texture load time, faster selection performance improvement in Viewport 2.0, faster pre-select highlighting on dense meshes, faster snapping performance in Viewport 2.0.

Moreover, there are other improvements in rigging, in animation data, new rigged and animated characters included in the software and some other staff that you can check in the release notes here.