Reading the performance considerations one might thing that the image quality setting affects the rebuild times (as reported by the Statistics tool). That is incorrect, it will drastically impact the graphical regeneration time, not the rebuild time.

Also the advice on turning off the "Verification on Rebuild" is quite dangerous, considering that is being made in the Sweep lesson, and sweeps can create so easily self-intersecting faces. Maybe the paragraph about the importance of this setting should have been copied from the Surface modeling book here.