Avatar Rendering Cost - Sculpty vs Alpha

I want to make an ornate Native American headdress consisting of many individual feathers. I figure that I can make it one of three ways:

1) Use rectangular prims with a feather texture that contains alpha "blank" space around each feather.

2) Cut, contort, etc the prim to the perfect feather shape, figure out how to warp a feather texture so that it will fit perfectly onto the shape. (this is my least favorite option)

3) Create sculpty feathers or banks of feathers, and paint them within Blender, if possible.

4) If anyone else can think of a better way, I'm all ears.

My main question is: Which has a higher ARC - a sculpty prim or an alpha textured prim? I know that alpha is very high on the scale, but I've not been able to find a "rating" for sculpties. As far as I know (which isn't very far) doesn't a sculpty actually have two textures - one for the sculpt map and one for the TGA texture?

Don't worry about it, ARC is a joke. Use flexy alpha prims or sculpties, whichever has the effect you want. Both can look nice.

Well I know. I'm just curious. I'd like to reduce the load as much as possible. I myself have a slower computer and a slower video card; I don't want to bog other people down too.

You'll better off making the using low resolution alpha textures on a regular prim, you can make them flexible this way as well, and you can use the same feather texture and paint different prims in different colors for example.