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Well 3Delight has some interesting scripted functions you can buy like LineRender2000
if your Graphics are crap one of the Luxrender options like Reality or Luxus might be an option to iray but you need to redo the shaders
Octane is great but same shader issues and probably no point if using iray anyway much the same requirements with a hefty price
Almost any renderer with import functions will work, but the majority of them will have you exporting your scene from DS as another format such as .OBJ so they can import it and read it. In most cases you will also have to reapply any textures and tweak the surface settings to work in that renderer.
here are some to try if interested. Vray and Maxwell are freakin awesome, but pricey.
List of unbiased renderers
I really like what Octane can do, but I don't like spending the time converting Iray projects to work in it.
There is Guerilla render too but I couldn’t figure it out
and Blender has Eevee as well as Cycles
you might try a render farm if you have large projects , daz works great with render farms that use virtual portals so you can connect to them Jack Tomalin a PA here at daz has a render farm, But I am not sure about his prices or his connection requirements so you would need to contact him about that information,..
there is a whole list of render farms that can use daz , https://rentrender.com/iray-render-farms/ look for the daz studio or SM poser icon on whether or not daz studio can be used in their cloud connection. some render farms are affordable some are not so read the fine print
I have used these guy over at RevUp Render https://www.revuprender.com/pages/render So I can vouch for then ,they have a easy virtual desktop server connection with a affordable $1 per server render node fee & they work with you every step of the way to make sure everything goes smoothly. Rendering cloud is just another renderer option specially if have huge projects you need to get done asap. I rarely use them. but its nice to know that there are cloud option available.
Of the options listed here so far, Cycles is the stand-out as the one that's easy to try out. This is because Blender is free and Cycles uses a PBR pipeline with HDRI lighting support, so it's relatively straightforward to transfer Iray settings to (though still very time consuming).
MentalRay is discontinued, so probably not worth pursuing dead tech. Octane is a PBR renderer, but its focus is real-time and near-realtime rendering for interactive applications, it's not really optimized for long, non-realtime rendering.
For all the renderers listed, you're also comitting to purchasing and learning some other 3D modeling and rendering software environment. For character art and animation, Maya is the industry go-to right now. Maya supports Maxwell, VRay, Arnold, Iray, 3Delight, RenderMan and others, but most of them (apart from Arnold) are a separate install and often a separate, non-negligible expense. And Maya isn't cheap either.
Blender 2.8 has the Eevee renderer, but this is not a competitor to Iray. Eevee is a real-time renderer akin to what you'd get in a game engine like Unity or Unreal; it does not do actual raytracing of shadows, reflection, refraction, AO, and is not generally suitable for final non-realtime renders. But... if you have good GPU hardware--which you'll want for Iray or Cycles anyways--Eevee is nothing short of amazing as a realtime preview renderer. If you're currently working in Daz Studio or Blender 2.7x using OpenGL rendering (Texture Shaded mode is DS) when you model and animation, you're going to find yourself short of breath when you experience Eevee.
One more thing worth noting: There are some comparisons floating around from the early days of Blender 2.8 beta, that claim to show head-to-head comparisons of Iray, Cycles, and other renderers. In many cases, the Cycles results shown are flawed or using non-final (beta) code that does not reflect the current performance. I recall in particular seeing a side-by-side with a Han Solo mini figure where the tester clearly got some normal map settings wrong in his Cycles shader nodes (either forgetting to set the image to non-color data, omitting the mapping to tangent space, or some other easy-to-make error). So take comparisons with a grain of salt.
Sorry, but I feel compelled to respectfully disagree with the highlighted statement. Actually, Octane isn't a real-time rendering engine. Their focus has always been getting the best performance possible for an "un-biased" raytraced "PBR" GPU based render engine (jeeze, that was a mouthful). They have been pushing the envelope to get realtime and near realtime rendering with the same high quality results, but Octane is still a true raytraced "unbiased" render engine, and is more than capable of doing "non-realtime rendering" like Iray (only faster, and with more features than Iray). Their AI lights and AI denoising, coupled with Brigade (their realtime/near realtime renderer) give amazing results very quickly, but if you want a better or higher quality image you simply let it cook longer (often needed to really bring out top quality sss and caustics and/or fine details). Yes, Octane is fast, but to say that "its focus is real-time and near-realtime rendering for interactive applications, it's not really optimized for long, non-realtime rendering" is not even close to accurate, since it is designed to be a top notch raytracer first, and the whole realtime thing has been a secondary focus.
I've been using Octane for many years (long before their big push for realtime raytracing), and was a part of the Carrara plugin closed beta team, and started using Octane when the DS plugin was in "Public" Beta (Octane Version 1).
As others have mentioned, Octane is an amazing render engine. IMHO it is a much more refined and capable render engine than Iray, and has features that Iray doesn't like true spline based hair support, out of core texture and geometry (this means it uses system memory to store texture and geometry data that won't fit in GPU memeory - yet still uses the GPU to render ..... no dumping to CPU when you exceed GPU memory like Iray does), AI predictive lighting to improve render speed, true AI denoising (much better than what Iray has), and many other great features. The down side to Octane is that you end up doing a lot of shader work getting everything looking as good (or better) than it did with Iray. However, if you invest the time to really learn Octane's shader system, adjusting shaders can go rather quickly.
None of these are, except for Octane and Lux, available from within DAZ and in my eyes, then they are irrelevant. Having to export and re-tex or even redo materials and stuff then I'd say they're not supported in any way, as you said yourself.
OK. What's your point? The OP (3 years ago) didn't stipulate that they needed to stay inside DS or that DS needed to support them. If you're looking for a renderer that meets your requirements, you already have your answer: Iray or 3DL. Shading for your renderer is an inescapable part of working in 3D, even if you stay within DS. If you import an obj, you'll need to shade it for your chosen renderer. If you want to use a 3DL material in Iray or vice versa, you may have to adjust the shader.
necrothreads are by their very nature outdated there is now Filament and bridges to other software that did not exist when you started digging up the rotting bodies