Hello,
In the screen shots below you can see render times for the same scene with the same specs (scene with experimental displacement for plane and volumetric smoke). In 2.73a it takes 1 minute longer to render than in 2.72b (tested few times and average difference is around 1 minute on this resolution).
Usually a following release was faster than a previous one- just saying, but it would be nice if 2.73a was at least as fast as 2.72b :).
