The other day I was using Process Monitor to see where Softimage spent its time during startup, and I was curious to see how Softimage compared to the big two. So, here’s some numbers.

I did this shortly after restarting my machine, so I didn’t have my usual kazillion different windows and apps open. Softimage didn’t have any workgroups, and Max and Maya were pretty much fresh installs.

Total elapsed time is the time from the first logged event to the last.
Duration is the sum of all event durations in the Process Monitor log.

If we look at the process activity timelines, we can see that:

• Softimage uses the registry way more than Maya or 3ds Max.
• Maya does more file i/o in terms of bytes, but Softimage has more file i/o operations. When a machine is more loaded up (more runnung processes), this is where Softimage spends more time.