At my current skill level I don't need / can't make full use of raytracing, and on my slow box (500MHz) it takes hours to render animations - I'd be happy if my animations were the same graphical quality as eg quake 3.

So...
Q3 max-detail texture mapping = 25-50FPS, ok quality
Blender's raytracing = 0.05FPS, great quality

I for one would be willing to lose a bit of quality in my draft work for a 500-1000x increase in rendering speed, what's the possibility of it happening?

PRE-ED> I *know* I can do a 120x100 render with all the settings on lowest, but that's *still* slower than 1024x768 quake on highest, and much lower quality...

You CAN make OpenGL preview animation renders (even textured if you're using the 'texface' option in the materials) by SHIFT-clicking that little renderbutton far to the right in the toolbar of a 3D-viewport window (the button looks just like the bigger render-window-button)... You don't get 25 fps, but its very much faster than standard rendering - and results in, well... draft quality.
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eXo.Entity - the movie-in-progress-project

Take JamesK's advice, this usually gives acceptable draft quality. And a clarification - Blender does not do any raytracing of any sort. It is a scanline renderer (e.g., it uses shadow mapping instead of raytraced shadows, reflections/refractions are faked with environment maps, etc.)
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-ray_theray

ray_theray wrote:

Blender does not do any raytracing of any sort. It is a scanline renderer

Mmmm..... technical.... I'm a programmer primarily, what's the difference? Wikipedia makes it sound like raytracing without polygons ???

ED> If anyone's interested I googled and found an answer - http://www.3dgate.com/techniques/000424/0424rendering1.html

I still don't /quite/ get it though - scanline looks at each pixel and calculates it's colour in an unspecified way, raytracing sends a "laser" through each pixel, the laser bounces about until it hits a light or the edge of the scene, and uses that to calculate the color of the pixel... hmmm... so scanline calculates the pixel color without using any polygons or tracing any rays, eh?

On-topic, thanks for the shift-render tip

I wrote:

You CAN make OpenGL preview animation renders (even textured if you're using the 'texface' option in the materials)

I just want to correct myself, for the record: Texface in the material isn't necessary - it should be quite enough to UV-map, assign a texture to faces with the imagewindow and switch to potatomode - it works either way with or without 'texface' toggled.

I wrote:

You don't get 25 fps, but its very much faster than standard rendering

And I correct myself again:: as long as there's not a huge load of very large textures, you might very well be able to render 25 fps or faster.
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eXo.Entity - the movie-in-progress-project