Quote - what surprises me here though is how slow Octane and Reality are

Reality is not slow, Luxrender is.  I'm actually surprised for the opposite reason.  I think what we are seeing in some of these replies are people who are just comfortable with one renderer, and know it very well, but don't know the others quite as well, and can't get them to perform the same way.  You can not compare Luxrender's speed to Octane.  Octane, on every scene I have tested, was up to 8x faster at converging samples than Luxrender, using my GPU vs. CPU at the time, with same lighting setup, and equivalent materials.  Yes, Octane will slow down if you use SSS and lots of refractive materials in PATH TRACING or PMC kernel.  However, no one is discussing how fast Octane can be under the same conditions in Direct Lighting/Diffuse mode, when settings are tweaked, with very little loss of quality.

There's a guy in the 3dsmax forum here who renders top-notch, realistic renders with Octane for most of his freebie previews, and believe me, the realism is insane on most of it.  A look also in his gallery shows some very high end images with incredible realism done in Octane.  I've discussed his hardware and render time specs with him on several occasions, and have concluded there's just no way to get the same level of realism in the same timeframe out of Firefly or Luxrender.  I don't know about Vue, because I've never used it, and really have no interest in it.  Vue doesn't play well with some of the high end softwares.  It may be good with Poser, but it's Xstream plugin is unreasonably buggy, and crashes constantly with other software, so I've dismissed it as a serious tool in that regard.  I know it's renderer has been used successfully in studio production, mainly for matte renders and flythroughs of extensive outdoor environements, but I rarely, if ever, hear of it used in production for much else.  Especially not character rendering.  It lacks a good skin shader (SkinVue is ok, but not anything like a good multi-layer BRDF SSS shader).  Octane can do multi-layer SSS, although it does slow drastically with Path Tracing, and most average or casual users do not know the proper node setup to get the most out of the SSS in Octane for skin.

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

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