[Nate Smith]

As Robby mentioned, your run-of-the-mill 3d accelerator will not help out with 3DS Max. Most 3d accelerator cards are designed to go from video memory(where things go after the 3d chip does it's work) directly to the monitor. Depending on driver support, it may or may not help with your previews(don't remember which of OpenGL/Direct3D/etc. 3ds max supports), and it most likely will not help your final render, unless the driver supports copying the result data from the video memory back to main memory for copying to the hard drive.