Hehe. Let's see... I'm running an Intel i7, 64gb ram, and an rtx 3060 12gb vid card. Close ups and full body shots take about 10-20 mins to render (the office environment is particularly demanding). As a general rule, 4-5 models in a scene is all my rig can handle before it drops to CPU rendering and the render time moves to hours. The club scene above went through in under 5 mins. And yes, some assets are particularly rough on a system. Sea salt hair is another resource sink. I can't even move a model around a scene if she has that hair. The billboards are a way around the crowd scene issue, and you can easily reuse them. So maybe have individuals in the front row that are going to stand out, then duplicates in the rear where they'll be less noticeable.
Viewing post in Trying out a new setting and technique ft. Denise
"Wait... you guys render in minutes?" Yeah... my rig isn't that beefy and renders themselves usually take an hour or two for what I usually make. I'm sure I can get it to make the renders faster if I tweaked settings, but as long as I can make a render a day, I'm usually happy. That being said, my current scenes have been going much faster when it's just two characters, a small set and a backdrop instead of a full-blown set.
... I may have a problem with letting perfect be the enemy of good ("Too hot for Itch.io" when, Stripe? :p)