Many large texture bitmaps a liability?

[David Collins]

I'm working on a project that will require the use of many very large bitmaps textures. There might be thirty different materials with bitmaps of around 1MB or more each.

The polygon count is high but not excessive, but I'm wondering what affect the large texture maps are going to have on rendering speed and overall memory usage. Can this sort of thing crash a project as fast as an insane polygon count or is it not that critical?