"I hear the higher end progs can be as slow as Bryce but I have no experience with Max or Maya." Well, 3dsMax is my application of choice. I've been using it since version 2. I now have version 6, and all I can say is render speed is professional-grade when done with the Mental Ray engine that comes standard with 3dsMax 6. What I mean by this is that a scene like the one you have set up, with reflections, and minimal number of objects and simple spot lighting would probably take just about a minute or two at most, perhaps less since there are "endless" tweaks that can be done to speed up rendertimes. Max's default scanline renderer would probably be a little slower, but nowhere near how long it takes for Bryce. Applications like 3dsMax (and Maya) also take advantage of plugin renderers like Brazil and Vray. These renderers are two of the fastest raytrace engines in the biz today, and could render that scene even WITH true global illumination at a resolution of 800x600 in just about 3-5 minutes. That's with global illumination. With just the lighting setup you have in those test scenes, it would only take mere seconds. Vray and Brazil are so fast, even large FX studios are seeing their benefits and using them more often now. Animal Logic, for example, takes advantage of Vray's speed quite often in their commercial works for film and television. So basically, Bryce's speed compared to any of the high end render engines that are used in 3dsMax and Maya is a complete blow-out. Bryce simply can't do all that they can do (true caustics and photometric lighting for example), but more importantly, it can't do it faster either. ;-)

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Tools :  3dsmax 2015, Daz Studio 4.6, PoserPro 2012, Blender v2.74

System: Pentium QuadCore i7, under Win 8, GeForce GTX 780 / 2GB GPU.