I don’t know if it’s bad or not, seeing as the longest render I’ve ever had was a handful of simple objects without a background and very simple texturing that took about 30 seconds…
Well, for one, this is yafray. And I’m going with Global Illumination on ‘Best’ quality, and a precision of one pixel for the cache. Oh, and 16 OSA. Also, although I originally went with a subsurf level of two for the pieces, I set the king and rook to 3. Roughly 270,000 faces.
With the internal renderer, however, this can be rendered in about a minute and a half (couple of lamps, one spot lamp, ray shadows, 16 OSA [takes less than 30 seconds if done with 5 OSA]):
I think the results from yafray are worth the wait, though. And I’m not that great with lighting, so GI is a good shortcut. 