Just did a small test in rendering speeds I had an image with 1 Vicky with P4 hair (Total Hair), 1 hirez square prop for a background, and 1 hirez square for water with reflect and refract maps plugged in. Displacment off and set to o.oo RayTrace on (needed for reflections) shadows on Smooth off remove back polys off min shade .5 max texture 4096 pixels samples 3 bucket 32 Raytrace bounce 4 post filter 1 gauss render time 19:56 set Raytrace bounce to 3, render time 20:07 Put raytrace bounce back to 4 and bucket size to 64 Time 20:00 Bucket back to 32 Min shade rate to 1.0 Time 10:30 The only quality differance I could see was the models lips did not have as much texture than with it set to .5. I did have to zoom in (4x) to see any differance. The render really slows down with reflect and refract, without refract it does speed up quite a bit (great for test renders to see different reflection settings) My CPU is P4 2.26 Ghz 1G RAM If you reproduce this test do not do it with a 20 minute render, it takes too looong :-(.