You can look into Level Of Detail (LOD) techniques for this. I read an interesting article in the game programming gems series that used something called interlocking tiles. This technique assumes your terrain is laid out as a grid where the vertices are evenly spaced on the x and z plane.

It sections off the entire terrain into "tiles" that are a fixed size (like 64x64 for example). By having the same size tiles making up your terrain, you can use an index buffer to draw each one separately. The idea is that you can have multiple index buffers, where the first one has the highest level of detail (LOD), and the last one has the lowest level of detail, maybe only 2 triangles.

The terrain tiles that are closest to the camera use the highest LOD index buffer, while the furthest terrain tiles from the camera use the lowest.

There's a little more to the idea, but overall it's a pretty simple one. I'll attach an image of two tiles that use different index buffers. If your interested in the article, its the second game programming gems book, article 4.2.

that's a nice page of terrain techniques

Just start clicking on the links in that page until you find the technique you want to use, almost all the links will bring you to techniques that answer your question here.

about the terrain you made, just use the heightmap you made the terrain with in 3ds max. It's really easy to load in a heightmap in code and create terrain. just create a grid, then use the heightmap's pixels to determine the height of each vertex in the grid