also, if you are rotating via a camera (scrubbing the timeline of an animted camera) you should have your material editor closed if you have animated textures. max will render out the material spheres for each frame, which isnt neccessary.
If all of those polys are in one mesh my viewport grinds to a halt. If the model is built in way that I can have a bunch of separate objects (not elements) then it's a lot faster. But for me that is 100% of the time, its not on again off again like you're experiencing. If you have the material editor open (especially…