Note that if such game content is encrypted, you'll be breaking the law in some countries just by using the quoted approach. In either case, you are not making a sound argument here. Many 3D games (FPS/RPG/etc) use rather huge textures, which are later downsampled.
In addition, if you load all graphical resources to system memory, even legacy computers with 256 Mb of RAM (plus another 1 Gb of swap file) will handle it since graphics typically has relatively low footprint compared to sound, music and video files. Nowadays, a typical low-end machine will have at least 1 Gb of RAM, so you don't need to worry about loading hi-res graphics at all. If you are worried about video memory, then you should know that both Direct3D and OpenGL load/unload managed resources to/from video memory on the fly, so only the stuff that is being drawn is usually stored in video memory.
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