Carrara only renders 'fast' for low quality. As soon as you increase the quality and/or activate advanced lighting features, it slows down dramatically. It is really not a very fast renderer at all.
Sure, if you render piss poor quality, it will be very fast. But it doesn't have very efficient GI or raytracing algorithms.
I was not very happy that DAZ ignored upgrading it's render engine in favor of moving towards making it a Poser-like app. Carrara will lose a lot of users to Shade now because of that; and they are not going to draw many users away from Poser (which is clearly their main intent). Not to mention the landscapers that will go for Vue6; for the vastly superior landscaping and the more powerful render engine (though somewhat slower, whcih is to be expected).

I won't deny that C5 has a good tool set. And I would suggest that anybody that doesn't have it should jump on the free offer. It would be a good addition to just about anybody's tool box.
I even did the C6 upgrade, so I'm not 'anti-Carrara', or just bashing.

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