Are they cached in the system ram?
Because I'm getting 395,000kb's being used for Beta 8.
Not a problem, but that seems kinda big.
I don't mind if its faster, but I was wondering if the graphics card doesn't already cache them cause I've got a 256mg.

Just sayin.

[edit]
Beta7 took 87,000kb's
[/edit]

well, shaders don't take up much space at all, and the images are cached by the video driver. Things will get swapped out to the HD if necessary.
How much ram does the production client take on startup?

Production Client
- 54,436kb's