Producing rendered images always involves making choices that affect the quality (anti-aliasing and sampling) of the images, the speed with which they are rendered, or both. In other words, there is always a tradeoff between speed and quality.
You can improve render quality through anti-aliasing and by reducing artifacts and flicker. For more information about anti-aliasing, see Improve rendered image quality and Adjust anti-aliasing.
You can make adjustments to a number of settings to increase the speed with which the scene, surfaces, and, or shadows render, and the speed with which the camera renders the scene. To find out about strategies to increase rendering speed, see Increase overall rendering speed.
In some cases, you can also reduce the memory used by the render to decrease rendering times. See Reducing memory usage.
Complex scenes and certain Maya Vector Render Settings can produce very large SWF or SVG files that are unsuitable for online delivery.
If you are using the Maya Vector renderer to create SWF or SVG files for online delivery, you can modify your scene and adjust the Maya Vector Render Settings to produce the best compromise between image quality and file size. See Strategies to decrease vector render file size.