I avoid FireFLAW like the plague. I use the p4 renderer unless it is absolutely necessary to use FireFLAW. It has a HUGE memory leak which they have yet to address. It is also much slower than the p4 renderer for same quality. In order to get sharp textures you have to crank Fireflaw's settings way up, which makes it glacially slow, to get the same results from the P4 renderer.

You don't need to use Fireflaw unless you're rendering real reflections, P5 Hair, etc. I find that most procedural textures render fine in the P4 renderer surprisingly enough. I didn't think it could do them, but it does.

-Tim