I have a several year old iMac with a 3.06 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 6 GB RAM and a 7200 RPM hard drive. I have a copy of Forge using the HQ pics and have not noticed any problems. My computer is unlikely to get bogged down with page ins and page outs while playing Forge and it should not cause too much of a slow down when it does.
A lot of work was done last year reducing the memory requirements and we may be at a point where only the low end netbooks are likely to notice a slow down. The old Java Heap Space crash reports should no longer occur.
The general feeling is that we should not encourage people to only use the HQ pics as this could cause a problem with the low end netbooks. As we add in additional UI elements and sounds and so forth the memory requirements could increase. HQ pics is an option but we do not limit people to just the HQ pics.
The /res/pics_link dir and its contents should probably be removed. We do tend to have old material left in the project that no longer serves a useful purpose. At times someone will remove some of this old cruft. But the devs typically would rather spend their limited free time working on new material.
