"Is Lightwave renderer faster than Carrara?" krimpr posted above that Lightwave 9 is supposed to be up to 7 times faster than LW8, so I think it's possible now that it's faster than Carrara. Keep in mind, while Carrara does have a very fast raytrace engine, I doubt it's the fastest out there. I'd like to see benchmark renders of it vs. industry leaders like Vray, Mental Ray, Brazil, FinalRender, etc. to see how it's speed compares. Question: Does Carrara 4 still only support Phong highlights, like in version 3? I see no reason to ever use a phong shader over Blinn unless you have no choice. Anisotropic is also useful, and I don't think Carrara had it as of version 3?

---

Tools :  3dsmax 2015, Daz Studio 4.6, PoserPro 2012, Blender v2.74

System: Pentium QuadCore i7, under Win 8, GeForce GTX 780 / 2GB GPU.