Since I do a lot of image textures, it's faster for me. Some procedural materials, like those by Johnatan Allen, which are very good, take a lot of time to render. OTOH, yeah, add some things to scenes in other programs and render time will rise accordingly. For instance, that antique watch in my gallery took about three hours in Cinema, IIRC, at 920x680. And Cinema is usually lightning fast, render times are measured in several minutes. Then, add Global Illumination and stuff to a Vue render and it will crawl... But I wish DAZ really brings down the Bryce render time with soft shadows or volumetric materials.

-- erlik