Alcatraz model (left) and Alcatraz render. 

Displacement & Depth of Field render.

Reality Check
Just to keep one foot planted firmly in reality, I ran a few more tests on my current system and had a friend do a couple of test renders on one of his available systems. I asked Mark Rasmussen, president of Enigma Studios Inc., to run a few mental ray rendering tests under 3ds Max for me. He used one of his older systems since it was available: a dual Xeon (single core) 2.8GHz with 2GB RAM and an NVIDIA Quadro FX 1100 video card. My own aging system is a Dual Athlon 1200 with a mere 1GB RAM and a Quadro FX 1100, but don’t worry, I’m replacing it with a shiny new HP system soon. I tested Displacement & DOF.max and MR_LightGallery_Max6.max on both systems, and had Mark do the same on his system. The results are as follows:

Displacement & DOF.max
Dual Athlon 1200 - 1:03:58
Dual Xeon 2.8GHz - 32:50
HP xw8400 - 8:53

Light Gallery
Dual Athlon 1200 - 14:35
Dual Xeon 2.8GHz - 8:29
HP xw8400 - 1:53

Final Gather alone took 5:04 on my Athlon system, which is more than two-and-a-half times longer than it took the HP to render in total. Over my current system, the HP was up to 7 times faster on each respective scene, and 3.5 to 7 times faster than the dual Xeon 2.8GHz system.