The strain of going from a 32 x 22 image to a 256 x 176 one is evident in how much longer this secondary image took to render. From 879.75 seconds (nearly 15 minutes) to 61,529.88 seconds (over 17 hours). Luckily, some optimisations and time-saving tweaks meant this could be brought down to 8,089.52, or near-ish two and a half hours.
Those are really reasonable values. I guess my laptop would take that long to render a 4k image as well.
Really depends on the complexity of the frame being rendered for how fast your laptop can render it
Ray tracing speed primary depends on the number of pixels, not the complexity of the scene.
The complexity of your scene makes a huge difference. If your scene has fewer things for light to bounce off of, doing the ray tracing is much faster
(Source: I do blender renders with cycles)
