Quote - Actually I don't think VRay, and certainly not Maxwell, have much distance on Lux. I can't compare speed of rendering but result-wise Lux hold its own very well in comparison with those very expensive packages.

I'm about to throw together a little test right now.  I'm going to set up a scene in Daz then export it to C4D.  Render it with Lux and Vray.  My average Lux render is probably abou 10 hours, closer to 3 for simple scenes and as high as 40 for really complex ones (on an overclocked i5 2500K quad core).  My average Vray scene has been around 2 minutes, the longest I've had so far was 20 minutes.  I'll post results so you all can judge the quality vs time spent.

But I need to add  that no matter what, I wouldn't be getting any decent results with Vray if I hadn't spent the past year playing with Reality and Lux. It gave me a great foundation for lighting and settings like spec, displacement, bump, etc in a very simple manner (and with a great instructor) that has made Vray way less intimidating