Having an issue with the install of max 2009 I have on this pc. For some reason I can’t get the DirectX manager section to appear in the material editor. I’ve made sure that in the DXManager.ini the option is set to 1 and not 0, but I still can’t get it to show. Strange thing is, if I load max with directx 9 as the viewport renderer, it will show the Manager in material editor, but it doesn’t have the DX Display of Standard Material option and checkbox. If I load under directx 10, the section isn’t in material editor at all :|

Is there some trick to getting it to work properly?

Use DX9 - DX10 is clunky at best.

As for the missing checkbox, IIRC you just need to turn on “show hardware maps in viewports”:-
Views (menu) > Show Materials in viewport as > Hardware display with maps.
I don’t even get that rollout so I can’t test this.

Note that this is both graphics hardware and driver dependant - older systems may not be able to cope.

Max 4.2 through 2013.
XP-64 (SP2)
NVidia 9800GTX-512 (Driver 266.58).
Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4GHz, 8Gb Ram, DX9.0c.