No, 3ds max is not a micropolygon renderer. 3ds displaces geometry only at its vertices, so if you want subpixel displacements you need to pass a huge number of polygons to the renderer, resulting in a very high RAM usage and slowdowns. Even more, you as the user have to take care of providing geometry that is fine enough by adding extra subdivision modifiers to your objects. PRMan or FireFly on the other hand receive coarse geometry data and subdivide it as required. They only create micropolygons for the current bucket they're rendering, so while the whole image is being rendered from millions of micropolygons, they hold only a few thousand of them in RAM at a time. About rendering as targa - why not TIFF?