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Most important is Shading Rate: for a high quality, keep it at 0.2, and this also makes render time go up, no shortcuts here.
Max Trace Depth can be lowered down to 1 or 2 if you have no reflections and no glass surfaces, but needs to be 1 + 1 for each glass surface the light is supposed to cross. A glass with wine would I recommend 6 for, at least, then you have a mirror behind that, double jt to make it 12, and you will render for a very long time.
Totte covered the important render quality settings on the render tab.
How you do the lighting also has a big impact on the render quality. Some lights have settings that affect render quality too. The UberEnviorment 2 light has quality presets and the UberArea lights have parameters that effect render quality too.
On UberEnviorment 2 you want to increase Occlusion Samples to 128, Shading Rate reduced to 8 or less, and set Max Error to 0.1. There is a Quality 4X preset for these settings.
On the UberArea light you need to increase the Samples to at least 24. I usually use 32 or 64.
All of these settings will make renders slower, so you want to use them for your final renders.
Thank you booth Totte and Mark. Great help.
Don't forget hair can also slow everything right down — I was doing a test render the other day, and the thin slice of image taken up by the character's hair took as long to render as everything else put together. This was using one of the Easy Environment light sets, so a more complicated lighting rig with high-quality settings would have taken even longer.
I strongly suggest AdamR001's DAZ Studio render presets. They range from fast test renders to Stupid High settings. You can adjust them as needed. They can be found in his free stuff by following the link in his sig line.
@SpottedKitty
Yes, I have noticed that different hairs create different render times. Don't understand why, but there is of course a good explantation for it.... I guess...
@Jaderail
Thx for your tip about AdamR001:s render setting. Really good and useful.
Depends on how the hair was made and what its settings are. Fibermesh hair and hair that relies on a lot of transmaps (opacity maps) tend to take a relatively long time to render. Unfortunately, that's most hair. You can often speed things up by converting the hair to the UberSurface shader and turning off Occlusion and Raytracing. Some of AprilYSH's hairs are set up that way by default.
I have a hair tutorial, linked in my signature, with more information and tips.
Something else to consider are the textures used.
Normal, SSS(Subsurface scattering), HSS(Human skin shader), and the several dozen parameters, can alter the quality very quickly.
Just switching from "plastic" to Skin, can have a major impact.
As far as recommendations for settings, it'll depend on what you are going for.
If it's "photo real", the render setting actually play only a small part.
I can get photo real on the defaults, with good textures, and lighting.
It takes a bit of practice to get all three things to mesh properly, but once you do......
My recommendations
1. use good textures(Sabby and MRL for example) and learn what setting does what.
2. Learn how to use the lights. I'd recommend reading "Digital lighting and rendering", 3rd edition, second if not available. and Dreamlight has some excellent tutorials on lighting in daz studio. Some are a bit dated, but the principal remains the same.
3. play with the different render settings. As stated above, shading rate, max trace depth, and the others have an impact, but so does everything else, to some degree or another. Such as pixel samples. IMHO, the higher the better quality it comes out, but i limit to 12 or less, as the render times can be quite long.
You render size will also determine render time.
What takes 10 minutes at 640x480, may take a couple hours at 3000x3000.
One last thought.
If you have a multi core computer and don't want it completely tied up with daz, you can limit the cores used via Task manager. Just select daz, and change the Affinity. click on dazstudio.exe, then right click to bring up a pop up, and select Set Affinity.
This will increase render time Significantly. BUt you'll still have use of the computer.