Two of the new lighting features don't cost any time at all. But the big one is nasty sometimes. It depends on your scene complexity. I'm still learning my way around it - you don't always need to set it to maximum quality.

I didn't time the renders above, but I'd guess the old-style render was faster than it used to be, about a minute, and the new style was around 10 minutes. Not sure if I remember correctly how long it took.

I'm doing a nasty one right now - 22 minutes so far. But it has 3 point lights with ray-traced shadows that are shining through semi-transparent bulbs. This kind of thing is evil and always has been.

But based on what I've seen so far, if you do a couple dozen simple tests you can get to know how it behaves pretty well. Then you know how to set it up without testing, and you can do a final render while you sleep. SM did a lot of work to make it fast, but I told them that speed was really secondary. The most important thing is that things look real. I'm willing to wait until morning to see a big high-quality render if it's going to give me the results I want without a lot of goofing around with lights. Predictable results overnight is better than unpredictable results dealt with by several hours of tweaking.

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Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)