Adaptive Degradation in Viewports

Adaptive degradation can improve viewport performance when you transform geometry, change the view, or play back an animation. It does so by decreasing the visual fidelity of certain objects temporarily; for example, by drawing larger objects or those closer to the camera as bounding boxes instead of wireframes.

Status bar > (Adaptive Degradation)
Keyboard > O (the letter O) toggles adaptive degradation.

When Adaptive Degradation is turned off, 3ds Max displays full details of the geometry, even if that slows down viewport performance and animation playback. Animation playback might drop frames if the graphics card cannot display the animation in real time.

Tip: Turn on Adaptive Degradation if you have large models you need to navigate around and if you are finding performance sluggish.

The Adaptive Degradation button on the status bar has three states:

Off: No degradation occurs.
On: Degradation can occur under the specified conditions. This is the default setting.
Active: Degradation is being applied currently.

You can change the display options and set other adaptive degradation parameters, on the Viewport Configuration dialog: Customize menu Viewport Configuration Display Performance panel (or for legacy drivers, the Adaptive Degradation panel). Also, you can toggle adaptive degradation for individual objects with the Object Properties Never Degrade setting.

Note: Nitrous viewports also have progressive display, which improves the appearance of viewports as time allows. When progressive display is allowed to complete, viewports show rendering-quality images. See Display Performance Panel (Nitrous Driver).

Procedures

To change the level of progressive display / adaptive degradation in the viewports:

Click or right-click the General viewport label (“[ + ]”). On the General viewport label menu, choose Configure Viewports.
3ds Max opens the Viewport Configuration dialog.
On the Viewport Configuration dialog, open the Display Performance or Adaptive Degradation panel, and adjust the settings.