Turok works quite differently than POV-Ray.
Because POV-Ray is a raytracer, each pixel in the final output is computed by shooting a ray from the screen and then seeing what it hits. The media command works by sampling the density of the media at steps along the path of the ray and adjusting the color of the final output pixel. In order to calculate the pixel color accurately, the ray must take very tiny steps. This means, that a ray that would have only had once bounce--or a couple of bounces if your object is shiny--may now need hundreds of steps if you have a large media container. Photons work by shooting out a dense cluster of rays from the location of a light, and then storing the ray intersections in a volumetric map. Just like rendering the media, media allows the photon ray to continue without bouncing, instead subsampling and storing an intersection at tiny intervals along the ray. When you render with both media and photons, this can mean thousands of calculations per pixel, which slows down the render considerably.
Turok, on the other hand, is a polygon renderer. Most of Turok's "glow" effects were a combination of particles and vertex lighting. To create the glow, large numbers of self-illuminating particles with a very soft alpha map surround the glowing object. Sometimes games change the blend mode when they render the particles, which makes them look even brighter. This effect can be made to look a lot like the results you mught get from pov's media, but it works completely differently. The particle method renders *much* faster, but it won't do things like pick up individual "light beams" in the glowing area... although, of course, this can be easily faked with more particles.
