What's the guidelines for using bump maps? I vaguely remember it being advised (pre 1.7 days) that bump maps could exponentially increase render times and some procedurals did not play well either in the bump channel.
I'm currently doing a fairly large animation where I'm trying to keep frame times to the minimum and I really don't want to have large AA times if possible.
Yes there was an issue with bumps in 1.6 days but that has been long fixed since then. You can use bumps with no problem now just turn off Mipmapping if it causes bumpiness to get lost.