using the getPropNames() method on the renderer, you also get access to all of the render dialog properties.
A while ago i started (and stopped) writing a script to optimise mem usage Vs renderspeed, based on the user’s system memory and the number of polys in the scene (borrowing from XSI’s bsp optimiser concept).
I’d love to know if there’s a way of recovering from the renderer the amount of memory used in the rendering process, as letting the script realise the pc is swapping to disk through the rendertime alone is quite inefficient :P.