> While I would imagine that most of that is texture data, and possibly
> models,

I imagine a good written game-engine (like a good written OS) will use 
up whatever unused resources it has available to the benefit of the user 
- in this case filling up the CPU RAM with a cache of GPU data that 
might be needed soon.  But it's not a minimum requirement for such RAM 
to be available, it's just loaded directly from disc a few frames 
earlier (big CPU<>GPU transfers are spread out over many frames anyway) 
if the files aren't in the cache.

> a chunk of it is probably sound data too.

Didn't think of that, I guess uncompressed CD-quality sound takes up 10 
MB or so per minute, maybe this is used a lot by PC games, IDK.  At 
least when using XNA with the xbox, the sounds/music are stored in some 
compressed format, it wouldn't surprise me if they are decompressed 
on-the-fly to avoid using up too much RAM.

> Depending on the game,
> it might also need to store non-trivial amounts of gameplay data.

Yeh, this is the main point I was wondering about, apart from graphics, 
what sort of data might a game need to store that runs in to several 
hundred MBs?  I couldn't think of anything straight away.

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