Quote Originally Posted by SilverWarior View Post
I have a tendacy to dig trough the games files to see which components do they use (sometimes can be easily seen from various dll files wich ship with game). I try to identify resource files containing graphics, sounds, etc. Many times I need to use various unpackers so I can actualy see ingame resources like graphics and sounds.
Do mind that I don't do this with intention of stealing any of theese resources, but seeing them can usualy tell you a lot about the way how game works.
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.