What will CUPS do for me?

I have a HP Deskjet 870Cxi printer and have been using the traditional lpr thing for years now. Seems to work OK driving the printer as a PCL device in monochrome, but if I want colour (or 600x600 mono) I have to use the DJ8xx ghostscript driver which is quite astonishingly slow. We're talking several minutes per colour page here. Normally this hasn't been a problem, but now I have the need for colour on a more regular basis. Does anyone know if CUPS will help me out here? I'm loathe to fiddle with a working configuration.