The new Skin Node inserts hardware skinning code directly into the shader when the shader is exported.

This is great for artists who want to use the shader they are creating inside 3dsMax on a creature that is suppose to be animated via bones in a game engine.

By default, the Skin node does not insert any skinning code inside the 3dsMax viewport, as 3dsMax is not setup to handle hardware skinning.

However, to experiment with hardware skinning (i.e. for testing purposes) the Skin Node does have the ability to do limited hardware skinning in the 3dsMax viewport for a handful of bones at a time.