It's been a long time since I have looked at POV ray and my knowledge of it is woefully out of date, but does POV ray currently make use of hardware acceleration or is it still CPU bound?
Will POV-Ray render faster if I buy the latest and fastest 3D videocard?
3D-cards are not designed for raytracing. They read polygon meshes and then scanline-render them. Scanline rendering has very little, if anything, to do with raytracing. 3D-cards can't calculate typical features of raytracing as reflections etc. The algorithms used in 3D-cards have nothing to do with raytracing.
No, and most likely never will.
POV-Ray 3.7.0 (released 6 November 2013) is the current official version for all platforms.
There are significant internal changes in this version due to the introduction of SMP support.
That's a rather old statement. Nvidia and Apple GPUs have hardware-accelerated raytracing now. But even without specific raytracing features, lots of renderers use GPU compute for some of the raytracing workflow.
I've merely quoted what the POX-Ray site has to say about it's own capabilities and beliefs at the time of writing.
For instance, the Cycles [1] engine in Blender.
If you're into ray tracing as a hobby you have to play with it at least once! Cycles does probabilistic rendering and can handle tricky things like caustics.
[1] https://www.cycles-renderer.org/
[2] https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/render/cycles/gpu_...
(edit) : TIL there's also Luxcorerender, which is also an engine that can render using GPU. https://luxcorerender.org/heterogeneous-computing/