The whole point of this post (which I now give up on, haha) is too disprove the myth that maxwell is amazingly slow compared to other renderers. If I had left either render for 2 more minutes, the noise would be gone too.

The problem is, maxwell bases everything on how real light interacts, but mental ray goes off of what YOU want the lighting to look like, in a way. this means it would be VERY hard to get the images to be exactly the same. The main difference between the 2 in the 3rd image is the angle and interpretation of the HDR by the renderer. Mental ray's image turned more pink because of it, but maxwells didn't. its just the way maxwell uses HDR. They were as close as possible though, with an identical lighting set-up, and the same HDR, so I don't see what the fuss is about. As I said though, everyone thinks maxwell is a waste of time because of how long it takes. I was just trying to show it isn't nearly as slow as most people think, and it could be used for animation.

-Andy