In my experience you are somewhat out of luck with what you want from maya, at least with default materials and the basic renderer. High quality usually just fails like that on consumer ATI cards, and only sorta works on Nvidia consumer cards. Realtime shadowing... I don't think I've ever gotten that working in maya. And…
you do can have realtime working shadows, but it just works with spot light, so if you want, use shadow map in a spot light and go to lighting -> shadows. Sometimes lights get sorted out and doesnt link with objects. In this case i go to the object, select it an reapply the same material, light comes again. This…