Does Maya use CPU or GPU for realtime Polygon rendering? Just curious. You open a high detail model in Maya, huge amount of polygons and you're just trying to look at it in the viewport. What's doing the heavy lifting, your cpu or video card? What about when using smooth mesh preview? Just curious.
Not used Maya in years, but GPU. If you see a huge performance dropoff with higher polygon models, that's likely down to small numbers of large batches being sub-optimal on recent GPUs in particular.