I use Vray, Mental Ray and Brazil in Production. And they all have their strong points.

Vray: Pros: Fast ray trace, intiutive interface. Include exclude objects. Great GI options. Great area lights. Vray proxies, fur etc Cons: Bad shader support, limited in getting under the hood. Render's look chaulky Cost: One license, 99 render nodes free. Brazil: Pros: Amazing render quality, great shaders. Not as complete, always seems unfinished. Great lights and other addons. Cons: Slow renders, limited GI options for animation. Cost: One license, two render nodes free. Cost per render node after that. MR: Pros: Great materials, and shaders. Great render quality. You can get under the hood with standalone Cons: FG for animation is weird, and having used other renders, it falls way short. Lack of GI options. No brute force. Maya seems to have better intergration for shader networks. Multiple versions for multiple max releases. So you have to upgrade max to get the new MR. Bad decision. Cost: free with max native, free rendering. Costs a small fortune for standalone.

I'm very new to Mental Ray, but I believe you can do brute force GI by setting your FG "interpolate over num. FG points: 0". I worked with Vray for a few years, Brazil for a year, and I'm just getting started with MR. So far here's my assessment: Vray: Pro: GI is pretty easy to set up. Fast reflections! Great sampling options and IMHO a better image sampler than MR. Decent physical sky shader and sun. Saving render settings saves material overrides. Vray dirt shader is useful. Vary Physical camera is nice addition, seems more accurate than Max's. Con: Lack of extensibility. Slow AO (with skydome). Flakey single frame distributed render. Brazil: Pro: Handy, but somewhat limited built in pass settings. Easy to use and very flexible lights/shadows! Still trying to figure out how to do Brazil's "sky color only" pass in MR. Nice render settings system. Con: Render settings don't save material definitions. Somewhat confounding GI set up. Lack of extensibility. No physical sky system. Custom objects in viewport (cameras and lights) act a little strange or can be cumbersome to work with. MR: Pro: Great AO options/renders. Nice physical sky system. Exposure set up is easy to understand. Great Arch&Design materials. Easy to use GI for stills (don't know much about GI animations in MR yet). Very extensible! Con: Somewhat limited image sampler. Reflections not as fast as Vray. I'm sure I'll find other stuff as I get to know it more. -Aubrey

I'm very new to Mental Ray, but I believe you can do brute force GI by setting your FG "interpolate over num. FG points: 0". I worked with Vray for a few years, Brazil for a year, and I'm just getting started with MR. So far here's my assessment: Vray: Pro: GI is pretty easy to set up. Fast reflections! Great sampling options and IMHO a better image sampler than MR. Decent physical sky shader and sun. Saving render settings saves material overrides. Vray dirt shader is useful. Vary Physical camera is nice addition, seems more accurate than Max's. Con: Lack of extensibility. Slow AO (with skydome). Flakey single frame distributed render. Brazil: Pro: Handy, but somewhat limited built in pass settings. Easy to use and very flexible lights/shadows! Still trying to figure out how to do Brazil's "sky color only" pass in MR. Nice render settings system. Con: Render settings don't save material definitions. Somewhat confounding GI set up. Lack of extensibility. No physical sky system. Custom objects in viewport (cameras and lights) act a little strange or can be cumbersome to work with. MR: Pro: Great AO options/renders. Nice physical sky system. Exposure set up is easy to understand. Great Arch&Design materials. Easy to use GI for stills (don't know much about GI animations in MR yet). Very extensible! Con: Somewhat limited image sampler. Reflections not as fast as Vray. I'm sure I'll find other stuff as I get to know it more. -Aubrey

pdavis, Dwayne, had alot of good and true comments about vray vs. mr. I've been using both for a while, and switch between the two depending on what I'm doing. Here is a comparison of different things they can do: Cost: MR wins. It's free, it comes with Max. GI: Vray wins. They both do photon mapping. But v-ray has a gamut of different ways to simulate global illumination. Displacement: Vray wins. Vray is much much faster and better than mr at creating displacements. Sampling: MR wins. It may be me, but i've found mr to render faster at lower sample rates. Ease of use: MR wins. There aren't too many options when considering lighting using final gather and GI. This can be good and bad. The A&D shader is very simple to use (of course so is the vraymat) I used to use vray more, but now I use mr (still love vray though), due to just simplicity of installation, and speed of rendering times. I also don't have to worry about keeping up with a plug-in and licenses. My two-cents.

Can't say for Vray, at least not yet, but I am currently beginning comparisons between Final Render, Mental Ray, VRay, and, eventually, Brazil. So far, Final Render is just faster to render and faster to set up (which pretty much confirms what everyone is saying - MR is slower and mroe complex). But I've only played with MR for a few days, so it'll take more to make a conclusion.

I'd try VRay free/demo, or what ever they have, and ask Turbo Squid for a Final Render demo (fully functional 30 day demo).

Hi Eugene, I am using finalRender and Vray, both are great tools. fR is pretty fast, you have easier settings to control quality and speed and they are pretty clear, Vray has the way to control that but they have their own vocabulary..., so it took me more time to understand it....Vray has an excellent displacement, and fR has great shaders..I prefer fR for interiors and vray for exteriors...I have tried to use MR, but it's very very slow, and two engines for GI is enought for me! Good luck!!!

<I started first with mental ray(most of my uploads here are) & later learned vray(latest uploads). Here's my say: <Although both are realy capable softwares, BUT Vray have an edge in terms of :

<great online references, which leads to <lesser set up time.

both will produce great results, so you are not going to lose choosing one over the other. however, if you are going to network render, especially if your farm has any size to it, vray will be the better choice based on no additional cost for netwrok render nodes.

The only real way to do apples to apples is to run one yourself in most cases. There is a Vray for Maya forthcoming if you use that package but the Beta lacks some options Vray for Max has. However, there are more things to look at beyond just performance. There's cost and the ability to develop the software (writing shaders, etc) that are important to look at. Beyond that, if you are really just interested in the performance, you probably notice that different jobs require different things from the renderer where one may perform better than the other so it's rarely cut and dry. I find Vray has exceptionally fast indirect lighting options, but the motion blur doesn't perform well against a rasterizer. You'll also find a direct comparison becomes even more complex when you understand that each system also optimizes based on their shading choices. The mia_material and the Vraymtl are similar but Vray also has more changes under the hood when using the DMC sampler that may override the shader (mental ray has some similar things but not to this extent it seems). A direct comparison would probably reveal very little and using every optimization available would potentially muddy the waters even more. The main reason being a "sphere on a plane" example would not be sufficient. You would need a pretty complex scene to truly see the differences and with that complexity comes all the setup involved. I tend to prefer mental ray because I have the option of the rasterizer and the benefits that come with it, but that's because I find myself doing work that benefits from it most often (motion blur).