ok, i just gotta say this.  i was able to do animated raytracing with refraction and reflection on my 486 with 8 megs of ram in 1995 with free open source software (pov-ray).  there is absolutely no reason even a single processor of my athlon 64 box shouldn't be able to handle similar tasks. 
frankly, i'm not even asking for speed.  i'm asking it just not to give up and get stuck in some weird limbo.  right now poser 6's firefly is giving me a black screen and continues to try and render until forcibly stopped.  if i get it to render, even with a miniscule bucket size, it doesn't take up to an hour.   something is very frustratingly wrong with poser 6 at least.  

taking time is no biggie.  but something is being inefficiently handled if it needs to crash where other free renderers have no problem (pov-ray, yafray, etc.).   and have had no problem with 1/100th of the hardware resources to pull on.