Hi everyone, happy new year

I've been reading a few of the posts here regarding mentalray as an excellent alternative to maya's native renderer. Now I know Mentalray has some really nice features such as GI,FG etc but in my experience these rendering options are out of the question when doing any form off final animation due to very high render times, so these leads me to ask is there any point using mentalray over maya's native renderer if your not able to use these fancy & expensive effects? I mean does Mentalray offer higher render quality or is it simply alot faster?
I know maya's renderer is slow but i've seen some really nice quality output from the standard renderer (The Living Forest), most of the time effects like GI,FG are faked (in film anyway) for the final render.

Hope someone can enlighten me, thanks James.