Originally Posted by Richard McCarthy

Maxwell (http://www.maxwellrender.com) It's one of the newest renderer to date, and produce remarkable result. Just head to their gallery and you will see for yourself. It is got very few button and technical term to overcome, and it is the easiest renderer to use out of the bunch. The shortcomings of this excellent renderer is that, it is extremely slow, as slow as upto 100 times slower than other 3!! Rendering time can be in DAYS (not minutes or hours). Because it use a very new technique to produce it's rendering, expect noise in the rendering too. Personally I like the noise because it makes the rendering feel more realistic, it feels like "film grain". For the near future, it will become an independent renderer, which will not require 3DSMAX. Presently, it is already got a seperate core, and it is bridged to 3DSMAX via plugin. The maxwell team is working on making as many plugin as possible, so it is possible Revit will get a direct plugin to this extremely easy to use, and high quality renderer.

VRay (http://www.vrayrender.com/) Finally, the current renderer of choice for many CG arch visualiser right now. It is the fastest renderer (slightly faster than Brazil or Final render) and produce excellent results. It suffers the same fate as Brail/Final render as not an easy to use renderer, but once you know how to use it, you can just bring up preset like other renderers. The team that produce this renderer has already gotten underway to produce an independent renderer called VRay standalone (v1.5) and presently, we don't know when it will come out, but the VRay.exe is there. So, It maybe very soon.