I did some timing tests with nodes versus textures, and nodes were significantly slower than textures - on a simple cube each extra node added pushed the time up by 2 to 3 seconds; textures of any side made little or no difference. Memory wise, textures at 1000x1000 seemed to take the same amount of memory as the nodes, but at any other size the textures took much much more - 2 meg per 1000x1000 texture, 30 meg per 4000x4000 texture; I must experiment with geometry instead - I've got a displacement maped column that would make the perfect text