I've been wanting a voxel quest DF client since I first saw voxel quest on HN. Does the voxel rendering really add that much overhead? I assumed that the majority of the rendering would be offloaded to the GPU, allowing the CPU to continue choking on how many well crafted tables the dorfs have seen today vs. the condition of their socks.

Most of the versions rely more heavily on the GPU. The fluid simulation runs on the CPU and is actually quite intensive (no surprise there). The most recent version uses the CPU to generate voxels, although it is also the least "stable" version and most people probably won't use it, but it is also the most flexible version (no GPU shader instruction limit, easier to run offline, etc).