I was wondering if my render time is slow, for what I have Good afternoon everyone. So I'm currently using a GeForce GTX 1060 and my processor is an Intel i5 6600k but my render time for 1 frame is about 5 minutes which to me in way more than it should be.

Of course I'm using the cycles engine and here are my settings:







A file for the project I'm working on can be found here (yes it's a Minecraft scene)

http://www.mediafire.com/file/ut8xi4l84psu0lp/Darnies.zip

I have some experience with Blender and understand most of the basics and the settings but can't wrap my head around why this would take so long. 

The questions I basically need to know are


Is my render time about where it should be
How can I speed this up (note my settings cause I've already changed a bunch)
Would it be advised to use Blender Internal if there is no other way of speeding this up
How do I know that my graphics card is working to its fullest (GPU rendering has been enabled in the settings and on the right tool bar)


Thanks for your time ^_^
Rendering takes time. How long is entirely dependent on the complexity of your scene, render size, the resources available on your computer, and the quality you are after.

It is normal to have a frame render for 5 minutes as it is normal to render in a few seconds, 5 hours or  5 days, it all depends on the variables listed above.

You can optimize your resources is by:

Setting the number of samples to the lowest number in which you consider the noise level acceptable.

Find the optimal render tile size. Depending on the complexity of your scene and the capability and vRAM of your card. Start with something like 128 x 128 and test by doubling or halving that number until you find what size render faster. The optimal size is unique to your system. A number that works for others might not necessarily work for you, or for a particular scene.

Other than that keep,
the detail of the vertices to the lowest number of vertices that you can. Bake simulations, maybe bake materials, optimize the size of your textures according to their size on the final render.