3ds Max: Recreating a brush

Hey There! Anyone knows much about max's native hair/fur rendering? ( aka shave n' a haircut )
Was tryin to recreate a brush ( like a fat paintbrush with stiff bristles ) brushing on rubber cement onto a rubber surface, and the dynamics of the brush hairs/bristles were detecting collision a good couple inches off the surface of the rubber area
the only way ive resolved it is by increasing the rubber surfaces poly count to like 80,000 poly's now its detecting collision near the surface of the rubber surface object
slow as hell, i wouldn't mind if i could pre-calculate the brush/hair's movement with the highpoly as a proxy and then return to the low poly once its calculated
the only way i seem to be able to do that is by converting the hairs to geometry, and i want to avoid that
my only option in the hair menu for dynamics is "live"
the difference in render time is very drastic , 14 seconds a frame for low poly collision surface ( very unaccurate ) or 49 seconds / frame with the high poly with no shadows

Can't you just hide the high poly for render and have the low poly standin?

Well the issue i'm sure isn't that rendering an 80k poly object slows the render down, its the dynamics calculations that are slowing it down id presume
but im not entirely sure, so i will test that right now
just cuz i really want to speed up these render times hehe
this is only a test w/ 3 objects in the scene, once i put it together it'll be somewhat more, so it needs to be as streamlined as possible
i just think its silly that the hair dynamic's accuracy is dependant on the objects poly count , if the hair all rests on 1 poly or 5000 poly's whats the difference? its still a surface to collide with
its a flat surface! its not like i want the hair to weave a damn basket