To use the Quicksilver hardware renderer, your graphics hardware must support Shader Model 3.0 (SM3.0) or a later version.
Hardware Considerations
If you aren’t sure what graphics hardware you have, in 3ds Max choose Help 
Diagnose Video Hardware. This displays a dialog with details about your graphics configuration, including GPU Shader Model Support, which shows the Shader Model version number.
- The Quicksilver renderer uses only a single GPU at a time.
- The GPU should have at least 512 MB of graphics memory; we recommend 1 GB or more.
- The Quicksilver renderer does not use CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) or OpenGL: It uses only DirectX.