They bought me my first computer in 2002, I was 12 years old. In about a year, games stopped being interesting to me and, having saved 60 rubles from school lunches, I bought my first disc with 3ds Max 6. In 2003 and until 2006, I did not have the Internet. All that was there was the program itself. And every time I started the computer, first of all I launched 3ds Max and studied it “by scientific poking.” First 500r. I started working on 3ds Max in 2006 at the age of 16. They paid me for the visualization of a nightclub in my city of Ivanovo. Unfortunately, neither this render nor the others have been preserved, because... in 2007, the computer’s hard drive collapsed along with all the information. since 2007, the works have been preserved and here, for example, are a couple of works from those times.
https://vk.com/album2903316_71222494

Then I worked at a game studio, then at the distributor Autodesk, then I taught courses on 3ds Max and made projects in it. From 13 to 32 years old, my life was closely connected with this program. But it’s been a year now that I’ve been doing all my projects in Blender, and on my work computer, 3ds Max isn’t even installed, and here’s why:

1. Blender Cycles X is a very fast GPU renderer. I once wrote an article that there's no point in learning how to fine-tune V-Ray, because PCs are becoming more powerful and very soon we will switch to PathTrace renderings. I wrote the article in 2013. Corona Render (PathTrace) appeared and became popular in 2015-2016. In 2019, video cards with RTX acceleration were released, which directed the development vector towards GPU PathTrace rendering, and now, if you have not yet switched to GPU rendering, then you should do so. If Corona Render, on my PC, renders a scene for 1-2 hours up to 50-100 subdivisions, and then denoises it, then Blender on the RTX 3060ti renders 1024 subdivisions in 2 minutes. 30 sec. in the same interior. And the render reaches 50-100 subdivisions in a matter of seconds. Those. to render 8 angles of the interior in good detail, much higher than it would be in the crown, it takes me a total of 20 minutes, instead of 8+ hours.
   V-Ray GPU also loses to Cycles in that out of core does not work in V-Ray, and therefore your scene may simply not be rendered if it contains an interior and, for example, more than two 8k textures.
2. Blender is a free OpenSource solution. Which means huge savings on buying software, or, if you are a pirate, it once again saves you from the “hemorrhoids” of searching for a good working crack without viruses, which can still crash, for example, after installing a parallel, more recent version.
3. Download speed. Blender starts in a few seconds, unlike 3ds Max, which starts in 30-60 seconds.
4. Hotkeys in Blender are implemented simply wow. Objects are moved much faster and the entire work process is accelerated. Also, to create layouts, I abandoned AutoCad, because in blender you can use hot keys to move polygons and vertices to exact distances.
5. BlenderKit library and similar addons. If you need some kind of ready-made 3D object, you don’t need to go to stocks, download it, unzip it, then click the “Import” button, etc. You simply select the desired object inside the blender interface and simply drag it into the scene immediately.
6. Sculpting and texturing. For them, there is no need to separately buy MudBox, Zbrush, Mari or SustancePainter, export the model to Fbx, then open it in these programs, then export it back, etc. In blender, you just need to go to the sculpting or texturing tab and do what you need. If you are not a narrowly focused specialist in sculpting or texturing, the functionality of the blender will be beyond your eyes.
7. Setting up light and materials is much faster thanks to step 1. Those. There is no longer such thing as setting the render overnight, in the morning I see that some material is not right, or the light is not right, or some poster has failed in displacement, etc., and then you put it on render again. All such mistakes are visible immediately, because the rough rendering takes a split second, and there’s no need to even step away and make a coffee.

As you can see, all these points save a lot of time and remove unnecessary “hemorrhoids”. But there are also disadvantages.

1. For interior visualization, libraries for blender cannot yet compare with the library for 3ds Max, which is available on the 3ddd website. However, this does not prevent you from downloading what you need from 3ddd in FBX format and reconfiguring the materials.
2. Displacement Cycles X is implemented worse than in Corona or Octane renderers. It is more resource intensive. For renders with displacement at resolutions higher than 1600*1200, 8GB of video memory may not be enough. However, you can:
   a) lower the Subdivision parameter
   b) install Octane, which is free for the blender, however, in this case, you will have to manually reconfigure all materials for octane
   c) wait for new versions of blender, it is developing very quickly
   d) buy an RTX 3090 with 24GB of video memory

For me, the pros greatly outweighed the cons. And over time, it seems to me, the last two disadvantages will disappear.

PS If you tried blender and it seemed to you that it was slower than 3ds Max, make sure that you are running it on a discrete video card and not on the built-in one.

If you want to try out what Blender is and test its speed and usability, I recommend checking it out this video tutorial, everything there is short, clear, to the point and without water.