Maya Freezes During Scene Load (RAM Spikes to 100%) – Despite Better Performance on Weaker Hardware

[administratorTXT47]

Hello Autodesk community,

I’m experiencing severe performance issues with Maya on a brand-new Acer Aspire 5 (Ryzen 7 8840HS, 16GB DDR5, NVMe SSD, integrated Radeon 780M graphics). Surprisingly, it runs far worse than on a much weaker Asus Vivobook 16 (Ryzen 5 7th gen, 8GB DDR4, SATA SSD), which handles the same scenes smoothly.

Problem Details:

• Scene loading freezes Maya for minutes; viewport is unresponsive until fully loaded.

• RAM usage spikes to 100% (16GB) during loading, but normalizes afterward (CPU/GPU stay below 30%).

• Same scenes work fine on:

  • My desktop (16GB RAM, dedicated GPU).

  • The weaker Vivobook (8GB RAM).

• Hardware benchmarks (Cinebench, Aida64, CrystalDiskMark, etc.) confirm the Acer’s components perform as expected.

Troubleshooting Steps Taken:

1. Reinstalled Maya (multiple versions:  2024, 2025.3, 2026).

2. Tested on clean Windows 10/11 installs.

3. Updated all drivers (AMD GPU, chipset, BIOS).

4. Adjusted Maya cache settings, disabled unnecessary plugins.

5. Optimized scenes (deleted history, frozen transforms).

Key Observations:

• The issue is isolated to scene loading—once loaded, RAM usage drops and performance stabilizes.

• 16GB should be sufficient (8GB Vivobook loads faster without saturation).

• No thermal throttling or disk bottlenecks detected.

Question:

• Could this be a memory management bug during scene initialization with Ryzen 7 8840HS/iGPU?

• Are there known Maya settings to prioritize RAM allocation or reduce load-time overhead?

Any insights would be greatly appreciated—I’m baffled why a weaker laptop handles this better! 

[jcasey7LEZV5]

Having the exact same issue on the exact same laptop. Only difference is I have 32GB RAM because it was upgraded 2 years ago. I’ve gone through a lot of problem solving you did, but nothing seemed to work. The scenes load just fine on others’ computers

Were you ever able to fix this? If so, could you point me in the right direction on how to solve it?