How smooth...?

[Wishkah]

Morning all! One day I'll die or know everything, and then I promise I'll stop asking questions =P

In the meantime, I have one about smoothing. I'm creating a curved metal surface, which I'd like to render mirror-smooth, and I'm wondering how smooth the mesh needs to be. When I look at it in the shaded viewport (it has a nice shiny material on it, so that the curves are more visible) I can see the 'steps' in the shading with two iterations of smoothing, with three it looks smooth. Will a renderer (when I get around to learning one ) handle smoothing (shading, that is) better than the viewport in Max? (Gmax, that is )

If I haven't explained well enough, throw something, and I'll come up with a screenshot or something. Cheers!