Optimizing Animations with the Geometry Cache

When you create a geometry cache for animated geometry, a series of files are written to your computer's hard drive that store the position of each of the points of the specified geometry over time. Geometry caches are used to optimize the performance of an animation. As your scenes become filled with complex animated characters that interact with environments and effects, Maya's playback performance can get bogged down, making the scene frustrating to work with. By using geometry caches, you can store that animation data on the hard drive as a separate file, thus freeing up resources so your computer can more easily play the animation and ensuring that you'll have a much easier time working on other aspects of the scene such as lighting, ....