A few features help you manage the polygon count for scenes and animations that must not become too complex.
Show Statistics, available from the General viewport label menu 
xView_submenu, lets you monitor the number of polygons, vertices, and so on, in the scene, as well as the frames per second displayed.
The Level of Detail utility, available from the Utilities panel, lets you manage the complexity of an object in the scene. For example, Level of Detail enables you to display a complex object as simple geometry when the object is at a distance from the camera.
ProOptimizer is a modifier that helps you reduce the vertex and polygon count of high-resolution models. This feature is also available as a utility, which lets you run it as a batch process on one or more scene files.
You can quickly access various statistics related to your current selection and entire scene.
The Level Of Detail utility lets you construct an object that alters its geometric complexity or level of detail based on its size in the rendered image. You create several versions of the same object each with different levels of detail, group them as one, and then run the Level Of Detail utility, which automatically creates a special LOD controller as a Visibility track. The LOD controller then hides and unhides the objects in the group, depending on their size in the rendered scene.
A few 3ds Max modifiers can help you lower the polygon count of your models.
The Batch ProOptimizer utility lets you optimize multiple scene files at the same time. You can optimize 3ds Max (MAX) or Wavefront (OBJ) files.
