In Daz Studio, you can also render using 3Delight, which is much faster for CPU rendering. It's an option somewhere in the render settings.
Great, right? Well, there are some BIG caveats to be aware of.
1. 3Delight uses a completely different setup for lights, materials, shaders and textures. Make sure your assets are set up for 3Delight, or the results will be pretty terrible. There are converters, like
You must be registered to see the links
to turn iRay assets into 3Delight assets, but results will vary. An asset that was made for 3Delight from the start is usually better, but those are becoming less common for new products.
2. 3Delight is a different type of renderer, and the results you get will be noticably different from what you'd get with iRay. Some things will be pretty easy to do in iRay but are nearly impossible in 3Delight, and viceversa. It will take quite a bit of practice to get awesome looking renders out of 3Delight. It's definitely possible, but be prepared for your first renders to look rather "bland".
Until a few months ago, I was more or less in the same boat you are (I also had an AMD graphics card then). A decent size iRay render would easily take 7 hours to complete, 24+ hours for the more complex ones. Which made it really easy then for me to decide not to bother with developing any game, and just have fun making the occasional render for a background on my mobile. Spend an hour or 2 setting up a scene, including some 14% convergence test renders, and when satisfied with the direction it took, leave it rendering over night, hoping the render would be finished when I woke up next morning.
So, no long rendered stories, no games. But, it did give some invaluable practice for setting up scenes (which will always be an ongoing process) and looking through scenes before hitting that render button to weed out as many faults as possible (fingers clipping into surfaces, getting the camera angle just right so objects don't obscure eachother or break the flow of eachothers' shapes, making sure to set convergence rate to 99.5% instead of the default 95%). It really doesn't hurt to practice for a long while before stepping into the game developing business.
If you really want, you could ofcourse already start on writing some game, write a script, do all the coding, use place-holder images. By the time you get a better rig, even if it takes a year or two, you'll have a very welcome headstart in development, by already having the complicating bits sorted out, with only the renders left to be done. Many developers would envy you for "only have to add the imagery".
