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I think you probably need to go spend some time researching the topic as you have some misconceptions about what they will offer and the main reasons for using one. First of all, there are no render engines where you will be able to open an old c4d project, press render and have a better looking image, it simply isn't going to help, and even if it did work, it would be missing the point. Whilst most engines will have a basic conversion function, that conversion is only a starting point to begin moving things over. There are several reasons to use another render engine, but you need to strike "it looks better" from the list, what you're really aiming for here would be "it looks better with less effort and in a shorter amount of time" All render engines have their own materials, their own lights, their own cameras and their own render settings, you will need to get familiar with these to make any progress. I'll use octane for my examples because its the one im most familiar with. In physical I have to spend time messing about with the clunky multilayered reflectance channel, dialing in obscure conductor and dielectric settings to get a realistic finish. In octane, just pick the starting material you want and 90% of the work is done (metal, glass, diffuse, glossy etc) In c4d I have to spend ages adding polygon bevels to my models to get nice realistic edges, In octane I just tick the "round edges" setting in the material and it does a high quality bevel at render time. In physical I have to restrict usage of area lights, area shadows, soft reflections and frosted glass because it destroys render times, in octane I turn on whatever I want because it makes no real difference. In physical I avoid GI because it adds a zero to the end of the render time and flickers if I get the wrong setting. In octane, GI is on by default and it makes no significant difference to render times. In physical I render out depth passes so I can apply DOF in after effects. In octane its so fast and looks perfect, so I just render DOF in the renderings. In physical I click render, go make a sandwich and 5 mins later I can see enough of the image to make a judgement call about whether my light has the right brightness, is in the right position etc. If not, I adjust it, hit render and browse reddit for another 5 minutes. Basically when it comes to the final look, Im making about 10-15 decisions an hour to get it looking right. In octane, the change is instant, maybe up to 5-10 seconds of rendering before I can make a decision. I can get 100's of adjustments done to my scene per hour. Regarding hardware and render speed, it opens up a whole world of opportunities. If you took a single machine and put a single 4090 gpu in it, you would possibly have all the render power you would ever need all in a single system. You would be able to churn out thousands of 1080p animation frames overnight, or 100's of high res 8k stills. In octane a full production quality 1080p animation frame takes us about 10-30 seconds to render with all the bells and whilstles on. That same frame with AO, GO, blurry reflections, best AA, motion blur, DOF in physical, would take an hour on a 16 core Ryzen system. If we're doing 8k stills then it might be 2-10 minutes depending on complexity compared to a couple of hours for the same still in physical. TLDR; You need to look at alternative render engines as an opportunity to get better looking images in a fraction of the time, and to be able to do all renders in-house with no more render farms. They're not a simple way to click a button and everything looks better. PS. just to say clearly what Srek probably isn't allowed to say. Redshift in CPU render mode is complete garbage and should be used by nobody. It has no reason to exist.

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