[jfrancis]

I've been trying to use the relatively new Node Editor in lieu of the Hypershade. My initial impression is that Maxwell shaders are slow to assign and somewhat prone to making Maya crash. Is there any particular reason to find lower performance when using the Node Editor in place of the Hypershade?

[Mihnea Balta]

The node editor does the same thing as Hypershade behind the scenes, it just shows things in a slightly different way. I don't know why it would be slower, or more crash-prone, except for bugs inside the Maya code. It could be related to the material previews. Do you have the swatch rendering mode set to "On Demand" or "Automatic"? (You can check by going to Window -> Rendering Editors -> Maxwell Render -> Maxwell Settings.)