well maya obviously renders from maya, but you can do a command line render which is from dos
GI_Joe renders from maya as its just a maya light setup
mental ray is integrated into maya so you can render from there, but you can render from outside (i think) like command line rendering
renderman can be used inside of maya but i cant really say the MTOR is all that great, better to render externally really

mayas GUI takes up ram processing power and stuff anyway which slows down the render by quite a bit which is why command line rendering is favoured cos its faster and theres no need to load a UI