I am just curious to the main differances in the versions of max 5 and 4. I've heard the max 4 has a lot more advancements and so in especially in the UVW mappping and unwrapping area. Could someone clarify if they are very differant, and if it is worth upgrading from 4 to 5.
I use 4 at home, 5 and 6 at work -- in a practical sense for game art, max 5 offers an improved skin modifier, render to texture, and better uvw tools. If that's worth a couple thousand dollars to you, then upgrade, otherwise I'd suggest ignoring discreets small iterative improvements until they offer something worthwhile of the upgrade and purchase costs.
By the way, all the above improvements are easily added with free third party plugins and utils to max 4 [;)]
Bullet21: It depends on what you want to do with the program. if you just want to model some in-game characters etc, you can use it safely on a pretty low-end machine, my old p3 700 works fine with anything up to about 20K tris, anything more than that, and its STARTS to slow down when rotating and zooming etc.
Anything about 30K tris, and its crawling, and animation becomes extremly tiresome.
However, the same goes for todays high spec machines... My fiance's p4 3.2 packs a sad when i set up massive behavioral crowd simulations etc,..
So it depends... if you just want to model and build some models for games etc,.. max 4 - 5 - 6 will run roughly the same, depending mainly on how much ram you have and various options may or may not be available to you depending on your video card / drivers. eg pixel shading in viewports etc etc.
u might want to go from 4 to 6 save having to upgrade again... until the next version