I hadn't really done any scientific timing tests, just general impressions formed while rending one scene over and over. Part of the image was a background with a complex procedural material (a starfield made over several fractal patterns used together) while other parts of the image included a V3 and a Maddie. While passing over the procedural background, the render just flew (multiple buckets per second), but it crawled on the characters (multiple seconds per bucket). That's why I said nodes were faster than geometry. Also, in this scene I was trying to render at very high resolution (4500x4500), and a texture of the right size for the background pushed me beyond the memory limits that Firefly could handle. Considering that the render took hours, I was more than happy to sacrifice a few extra seconds or minutes on the procedural texture in order to have the memory to complete the render.