Short Comment:
If that were true, then properly speaking not a single modern game should run on any setting on my system... Yet quite the opposite--I get great performance, while people with quad core and lots of slow ram get poor performance.
Long Comment:
I played Divinity 2: ED with the massive texture mod and on high in Win 7. It was smoother than playing with medium textures, strangely.
I have GTX 280 with 1 GB ram and only 1 GB ram in the system. I play, however, every new game without problems, empirically speaking! How come?
My ram is the lowest latency modules you can buy and at the same time very highly overclocked, as is everything in my PC.
How about Larian lets us try to see whether the game will indeed crash with high textures or not? How can we know without trying when everyone's system is totally different? How can anything definite be said without a controlled experiment?
If no crash, then great for that person. If crash then back to medium everything goes, anyway. Besides, the proper use of Win 7 is to change the interface to basic from ultimate when playing games or running rendering.
Increase in performance by raising settings is normal.
You are offloading from the CPU and making the GPU earn it's money.
