gmax 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.
You use display performance controls to determine how objects are rendered and displayed in the viewport.
The Preferences dialog's Viewports panel contains options for fine tuning the performance of the viewport display software.
See Viewports Preferences Settings.
The Viewport Configuration dialog contains a panel labeled Adaptive Degradation that dynamically drops the rendering level on display performance. You set the parameters controlling the trade-off between display quality and display speed.
To see and modify an object's display properties, right-click the object, select Properties, and go to the Display Properties group box; see 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.
One way to increase display speed is not to display something. You use the Hide and Freeze features on the Display panel to change the display state of objects in your scene. See Hide Rollout and Freeze Rollout.
Adaptive Degradation dynamically adjusts your rendering levels to maintain a desired level of display speed. You have direct control over how much "degradation" occurs and when it occurs.
Active and General Degradation use the same choices as the viewport Rendering Levels panel. Active Degradation controls rendering in the active viewport while General Degradation controls rendering in all other viewports.
The selected levels determine which viewport rendering levels gmax 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.