Renderer > High Quality Rendering

When high quality interactive shading is turned on, the scene views are drawn in high quality by the hardware renderer. This lets you see a very good representation of the look of the final render without having to software render the scene.

The following is not supported:

motion blur
software multi sampling
Tip
If you require faster playback or camera tumbling while using Maya’s High Quality shading, turn on Interactive Shading (Shading > Interactive Shading).

To turn on high quality shading

Make sure smooth shading (or higher) is on (press 5, 6 or 7).
In the desired scene view, select Shading > High Quality Rendering.

Renderer > High Quality Rendering >

These are descriptions of the options in the Hardware Renderer Display Options window.

Display Quality

Low Quality Lighting: Low quality lighting is essentially per-vertex lighting, which calculates light only on vertices, then blends the results. Renders are faster and of reasonably good quality.
Match Viewport Lights: When turned on, only as many lights as are supported by the graphics card (typically 8 lights) are used.
Transparent Shadow Maps: Those regions of an object which are fully transparent will not cast a shadow. For example if you map the transparency channel of a shader (on an object) to a checker texture the fully transparent portions of the object would not cast a shadow.

Display Parameters

Occlusion Culling: This option improves performance for scenes with many objects, where one or more objects can be obscured from the viewpoint of the active camera. When turned on, this option increases performance by preventing out-of-view objects from being drawn.
Culling Override: Every position on a surface has a normal which points in the direction that is considered (for culling purposes) to be the "front side" of the surface.

Single sided means the surface is illuminated by a light if that normal is visible from the light.
Double sided means that the surface is illuminated on the front and the back sides.
Color Texture Resolution

If hardware rendering cannot process a shading network on board the graphics hardware, the shading network is evaluated and converted to a file texture (2D image) that the hardware renderer can use.

This option specifies the dimension of the resulting texture. Affected channels are color, incandescence, ambient, reflected color, and transparency. The default value is 128, which means that any baked color images will have a dimension of 128 by 128 pixels.

Bump Texture Resolution

If hardware rendering cannot directly process a shading network on board the graphics hardware, the shading network is evaluated and converted to a file texture (2D image) that the hardware renderer can use.

This option specifies the dimension of the resulting texture. The default value for this option is 256, which means that any baked bump images will have a dimension of 256 by 256 pixels.