I have to agree with everyone. It just depends, most of the time I prefer photo-realistic ones, because I tend to do close up's of my figures. But, handpainted ones can be just dandy, too- Only, I personally hate it when the maps are nothing but just noise patterns- And often times the photo-realistic ones have these ugly flash reflections, etc, that make it pretty hard to render from angles other than that which the photos were taken from, etc (jmho)- I usually don't have too many problems with my sys. crashing (Intel 750mhz, 396 MB RAM) but, I'm really careful at just what all I have going on at the same time, etc, and I'm patient ;)