You need to ask what the end result of the rendering should be: design development, a final presentation work or a commercial marketing image.
And it is not only rendering engine quality to consider.
If your intent is to provide service as a photorealistic illustrator, you need to consider the accessory elements available within a given realm - like supremely accurate palm trees, for instance. Entourage elements represent the biggest investment for an illustrator, from top quality surfaces to detailed UV mapped elements of all types.
Another thing is the community of users that support your work and help solve problems. 3Ds Max is supreme in both areas. Almost every superior illustration that I see is a product of the Max/Vray school, altho I do personally prefer Cinema, working on the Mac.
If you are a designer looking to communicate design ideas, look no further than Artlantis because of simplicity and speed.
As for steps: you make your design decisions, select viewpoints showing storytelling aspect, add entourage to complete the compositions and render numerous lighting alternatives to discover the most flattering direction and color theme.
These steps SHOULD take place incrementally during the design stage since seeing the preliminary massing within a realistic context informs design. Adding and evaluating entourage and surface textures while the design develops overcomes last minute panic where bad renderings happen. This means using coffee breaks and lunch hours to generate developmental views [advantage to Artlantis since it easily updates its scenario with new design work from Archicad]
Doing any rendering in any application can become tedious the more specific your artistic needs are - the right trees turned 'just so' to frame the structure and not cast shadows on it. Most guys on this forum are happy if they get their building somewhere in the shot, but work like that repels, rather than engages viewers.
Whatever you do, understand that rendering is NOT AUTOMATIC, no matter what the seller's introsuction claims.
Dwight Atkinson