3ds Max contains controls to help you adjust display performance: the balance between quality and time in displaying objects.
Depending on your needs, you might give up some display speed to work at higher levels of rendering quality, or you might choose to maximize display speed by using Wireframe or Bounding Box display. Which method you choose depends on your preferences and the requirements of your work.
Display Performance Controls
You use display performance controls to determine how objects are rendered and displayed.
Viewport Preferences
The Customize 
Preferences dialog's Viewports panel contains options for fine-tuning the performance of the viewport display software. See Viewport Preferences.
How Objects Are Displayed
To see and modify an object's display properties, right-click the object, select Properties, and go to the Display Properties group box; see Object Properties. These options affect display performance much the same way as viewport rendering options. For example, turning on Vertex Ticks for an object with a lot of vertices will slow performance.
To see and modify how objects are displayed, you can use layers. You can then quickly control the visibility and editability of similar objects from the quad menu.
Which Objects Are Displayed
One way to increase display speed is not to display something. You can use the Hide and Freeze functions on the Display panel, quad menu, Manage Layers Dialog, and Scene Explorer to change the display state of objects in your scene. The Hide and Freeze features also affect final Rendering and Video Post output. See Hide Rollout and Freeze Rollout.
Setting Progressive Display and Adaptive Degradation
Progressive Display (for Nitrous viewports) progressively improves viewport quality, while Adaptive Degradation dynamically adjusts viewport rendering levels to maintain a desired level of display speed. You have direct control over how much "degradation" occurs and when it occurs.
The active levels determine which rendering levels 3ds Max falls back to when it cannot maintain the desired display speed. You can choose as many levels as you want but you are advised to choose only one or two levels for each type of degradation.
See Adaptive Degradation.