Waldo,

Grooves is not render time displacement, as you mentioned it's polygon based. It takes quite a bit of RAM to do this technique in Carrara using Grooves.

A 3Ghz with 2gig of RAM should be plenty to put a few of these on the screen. When the question first came up, I did all my experiments on a PIII-1ghz with 512meg. If you can avoid having the UI display the mesh, you can keep it reasonably responsive. By applying your shaders before applying Grooves and keeping your 3DView on bounding box, you can probably squeeze more objects and/or detail in scene.

Check out Ken Brilliant's DeeComposed image at http://www.brilliant-creations.com/deecomposed.htm for another example of the technique in Carrara. Scroll down a bit and he shows the control cage, smoothed mesh, and Grooves displaced final mesh.

Regards,
Eric Winemiller
Digital Carvers Guild
3D plug-ins for Carrara
http://digitalcarversguild.com

Eric Winemiller
Digital Carvers Guild
Carrara and LightWave plug-ins