I have seen this happen sometimes, with several Alpha releases, now with one of the daily builds (max 2012, Build timestamp: Jul 23 2014 21:25:48).
Basically, it seems sometimes geometry is not being parsed/translated. This happened occasionally when isolating selection, the isolated object would not render at all, the passes are being calculated very quickly as if there's nothing to be rendered (like pass 500 after 10 seconds).
I just had a lengthy max session where nothing would render anymore. After restarting max and loading the same scene the problem persisted, switching between user/view and then to perspective and rendering in between seemed to solve it.
It is NOT reproducible easily, it just happens at some point, really can't give any steps for a repro. It's not a huge problem but it indicates that when you render a final frame geometry might be missing which is rather nasty.
I wonder if anyone has seen this as well?
