> Now that you got a new pc, you should try out the latest blender builds with
> cycles enabled and play with it a bit (like downloading some ready scenes,
> choosing the cycles engine and hitting F12).  It's the new, unbiased
> render-engine and is quite fast.

Huh. I didn't even know Blender had a rendering engine... I thought it 
was just a modeller?

> If your gpu is a new nvidia, it can run on it,
> if not, just cpu.  But it's rather fast even on my humble dual-core at work, so
> should do just fine on yours.

nVidia GeForce 260 GTX. Is that new enough?

>>>> I gather that procedural texturing is quite possible on a GPU. (But
>>>> nobody uses it, for whatever reason.)
>
> It's not artist friendly, aside perhaps as a rough base (like having a palette
> of procedural textures for painting bitmaps) or for purely natural terrain.  I'd
> also add that it's certainly more costly to compute for games than static
> bitmaps.

Bitmap textures have the advantage that if you want wood, you can just 
point a camera at a physical plank of wood, and you're done. It has the 
obvious disadvantage that it takes up gigabytes of storage, and looks 
blurry as hell.

POV-Ray has some really damned nice wood and stone textures. (I mean, 
unless you're enough of a dendrologist or geologist to realise it's 
scientifically inaccurate.) With the right noise generators and spatial 
transformations, you ought to be able to make something really nice. 
It's probably not even all that expensive either.

Whether it's "artist friendly" depends on what your artists are expecting.

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