Bucknyne - Turning off "Full raytracing" may help, but there may also be a hit you won't want in render quality. Sometmes turning on indirect lighting and setting it to ambient occlusion will improve speed because it uses more sampled lighting rather than true raytracing (but your scene will be a bit darker with ambient occlusion enabled).

In general, full ratracing takes a lot of CPU cycles regardless of the renderer used (That is why LuxRender is sooo slow). Any setting that can fake raytracing in an acceptable manner for your desired result will typically speed up your render times. Personally though, I'm pretty happy with the genral performance of Carrara's renderer, and usually just crank up the settings and let it go (I  pimarily do stills). Carrara is a lot faster for equivalant results when compared to DS and Poser 2014.

Luxus/Luxrender won't be faster, but the results are great. I've used LuxRender quite a bit, and the CPU only renders are ..... well .... slooooow compared to Carrara (I have an image in my gallery here, Castle Mage, that took 70 hrs. in Lux). But Lux can produce some stunning images!! The GPU assisted renderer in Lux is a bit faster, but still slow compared to Carrara, and it's still a bit unstable (and uses a lot of RAM). The GPU only renderer in Lux (SLG) is FAST, but quite limited with materials, and a also a bit unstable - but it is really fast when you get it to work well with your scene.

I haven't tried Shade in years - but when I did the interface was really difficult for me to grasp - but you might love it. The renderer in shade is very good, and was about the same speed as Carrara when I tried it, but that has probably changed. I doubt however that rendering speed in Shade even comes close to Octane (more on Octane next), as shade has a CPU only renderer.

Another option, though not available for Carrara now, but will be in the near future, is Octane Render (plugins are available for Poser and DS now). It's a GPU only renderer (Nvidia cards only) that is Really Really Really FAST. They just announced the development of a plugin for Carrara. I've been putting the Demo for Poser through it's paces for several days now and WOW - beautiful renders in minutes that would typically take hours in Carrara (or even longer in Poser of DS). The down side is you are somewhat limited by the GPU RAM and texture maps limitations, everything (geometry and textures) needs be able to fit into VRAM. Just for comparison, the image in my gallery that took 70 hours in Lux, took about four minutes in Octane - with equivalant results!

One other option for GPU rendering is Cycles in Blender. Of course this would mean exporting  your scene to OBJ, then importing it into Blender and setting up all your mats/shaders in Blender. Might not be woth the effort, but the advantage to Cycles (and the GPU rendering in Lux) is that it is OpenCL - and can use ATI or Nvidia Cards.

Hope this helps.

__________________________________________________________

My Rendo Gallery ........ My DAZ3D Gallery ........... My DA Gallery ......