Well, some of you have told us that this is the "biggest release ever" and it does feel that way to the exhausted dev team. After the 2010 release, we knew we had a high bar to meet with the next release (2011). It seems we may have hit that bar with at least a few of you. Obviously, it is still early in the process and we can't be sure until you all get your hands on it and put it to the test.

Here are some stats as to what beta users thought of the release:

360 respondents

How would you rate your impression of 3ds Max/Design 2011?

• 86% fell between a "I like what I see" and a "Great release!"

How would you compare 3ds Max/Design 2011 to the last version of 3ds Max that you were working with?

• Performance: 59% said it was better or much better, 95% said it was as good or better
• Features: 84% said it was better or much better, 100% said it was as good or better
• Stability: 40% said it was better or much better, 94% said it was as good or better
• Usability: 57% said it was better or much better, 95% said it was as good or better
• Interoperability: 64% said it was better or much better, 99% said it was as good or better

For 3ds Max/Design 2011, we had the largest beta ever, over 1,000 people participated in the process - probably more than in the last 2 or 3 betas combined. We're trying to expand the number of voices while still keeping control over the process.

From a stability standpoint, we ask the beta users how frequently they experience failures with the release (keeping in mind that they generally are working with beta software and not necessarily with what we ship).

• 17% experience zero failures
• 54% 1-5 per week
• 24% 1-5 per day

Always more work to be done on stability, but there's hope that this release will reflect some of our efforts. Between 300 and 325 legacy bugs (bugs that were in the 2010 or earlier release) were fixed as part of this release.

Anyway, I can predict that many of you are going to discover that your current GPU is not quite up to the task of what we're doing with the product, but again, I think it is important we are leading the effort to leverage the GPU rather than waiting around to leverage this resource. It's painful for us and for you, but I think we're betting on the right horse. Hope you feel the same!