Determining the hardware shading settings to use

The default views in 3ds Max 2012 and 2013 are driven by a newly introduced technology called Nitrous Accelerated Graphics Core , which is designed to allow larger sets of assets to be handled in real time with a better quality visual appearance.

You can revert your display settings to Direct3D alone, or to OpenGL, or even Software, but it depends on what hardware you are using, particularly your graphics card. If you are using a laptop with an integrated graphics card, you may be best off with Software or OpenGL rendering, but this will likely not be very fast or look as good. Nitrous views depend on access to the GPU (graphics card cores) to provide a responsive, high-quality viewport shading, and this is what gives you real-time ambient occlusion (soft shadows) and accurate shadow casting and reflective, transparent surfaces in the viewport even with unlimited lights.

You can read more about hardware concerns for 3ds Max in The Area—Discussions community—which you can access from the 3ds Max Help menu | 3ds Max on the web | The AREA. Also, you can obtain a report on 3ds Max's view of your GPU: Help | Diagnose Video Hardware.