It is, also, quite expensive as you need to not just get the plug-in but also a standalone Octane licence (the plug-in comes bundled with an in-built version of Octane). It has just undergone a fairly major overhaul so whilst there is a swathe of new features there are, naturally, a few new gremlins. The OcDS plug-in is, whilst still a beta, pretty good. Octane has a large free database of materials that you can work with to replace the more flat colors in Iray with.There is, or at least was, a demo of the standalone to which you can export/import your DAZ scene in.obj format (you'll have a bit of 'fun' setting the camera up in Octane though)

Octane will look at Iray shaders and try and figure them out. If anything, the way to make iray render times faster is the scene optimizer tool. I know about the max duration for rendering and avoid it. However, when you are rendering a larger size video in terms of height and width you want better details.

If you are rendering a smaller video format, sure. But before each rendering, I use my brain to know if the high definition of the rendering has a real use for my work. Octane is very fast but it overwrite colors. I tried Octane and I find that its renderings flatten the color palette width. Then, if I like my work, I set a higher limit. Personally, for an image, I choose Max Time = 180 seconds for the rendering. In Daz Studio, for Iray, you can set the maximum duration for rendering (menu: Render > Progressive Rendering > Max Time) ( This do es n't make any sense to me , because the eye doesn't have time to appreciate the quality of the images that scroll quickly on the screen) When we making an animated movie, we don't need to have high resolution images.

Daz3d octane render