Rendering with direct lighting takes too long I'm using Cycles to  render a simple scene that consists of a simple house (4 cubes and 1 plane), which contains some furniture (see my file http://www.pasteall.org/blend/35552 ). Normally, using direct lighting allows me to reduce the render time considerably. So I fixed the bounce max and min to 1. I used path tracing integrator and limited global illumination as Light Paths option.



I have not used  any texture image for the furniture. I used just a diffuse material (diffuse BSDF node).

The rendering time is 20 s/ frame on CPU i7 dual core and 8 GB RAM. I think it is too long for direct lighting. Any comments?
For direct lighting in Cycles, you need to set bounces to 0, not 1, as done by the Direct Light preset. There is a bounce of indirect light in your render.

If you want to get performance closer to Blender Internal direct lighting, you can switch to branched path tracing, lower AA samples to e.g. 8, and increase the samples on the individual lights and world as needed to reduce noise.