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The z-buffer is hardware support for figuring out what polygons are rendered closest to the plane of the screen. Turning it off frees up video ram for other uses. On low memory video cards, turning it off can mean that hardware acceleration is available where it might not be otherwise. Turning it off also means that the last thing drawn to a particular pixel is what is viewed by the user even if it is "behind" something drawn earlier. Mac MA is highly optimized for running with the z-buffer off, but there are some conditions which can occur which are not something we can catch without restructuring the program pretty extensively.
The trade off is that sometimes there are transient visual anomolies which wouldn't occur with z-buffer on. Most people don't notice.
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