What is the scale of your asset? If this is a gigantic scale, you might be hitting precision or lighting limits. It's best to work within real-world scale. So for example if this was a streetlight or electrical pole, it would be about 12 meters tall.
is there a way to change the default settings for primitives in 3ds max? for example, change the number of segments in a plane from 4x4 to 1x4...just curious