cassiohoma

did you try convert to a nurbs curve?

I playing with H15 Apprentice, and i did the same test, just to see whats happen, and it's works, even w “no supported intel HD400”, it's quite surprising that H14 crash all the time, but H15 works fine until now…
Viewport now shade polygons without inverted normals, no more freeze screen and so on…
but, maybe, it's a lucky day, and i didn't test well..
but those crashs listed by Enivob, not happens on my mac mini w intel HD400 and 10.10.5

At least on Yosemite…
Anyone else?

You can use your pyro flame as Geometry light, it's may slow your render, but if you use a PBR and GI light to cache your photon map, to reduce noise, it's may be faster than using many lights instanced…

Also, your scene will be more realistic…

cheers