I'm loving Daz Studio 1.8. The Posing tools and responsiveness are soooo nice to use.

Render quality is nice, but for some reason, particularly with spotlights, its achingly sloooow. Right now I'm at 54 minutes and counting on a scene with 3 spotlights. Shadows are raytraced, but not soft. Render is at best 1/3 done! This is on a dual Xeon machine with loads of memory. . .

Using the 3Delight software renderer, I hasten to add.

Anyone have useful idead about render times?

on your advanced render settings tab, check the max ray trace depth, that can effect the render time dramatically.  I have mine set at 2, on some renders you can even get away with setting it to 1.
cimaira

Try reducing the value of Shadow Samples. That can make a huge difference to render times.

thanks for these pieces of advice. Valuable and help.

for whatever reason, the 3Delight renderer has the least render efficient spotlights in the business. . .

THATS what i wanted to know! thanks guys!