I am working on a GUI in XNA 4.0 at the moment. (Before you point out that there are many GUIs already in existance, this is as much a learning exercise as a practical project). As you may know, controls and dialogs in Windows actually consist of a number of system-level windows. For instance, a dialog box may consist of a window for the whole dialog, a child window for the client area, another window (barely showing) for the frame, and so on. This makes detecting mouse hits and doing clipping relatively easy. I'd like to design my XNA GUI along the same lines, but using overlapping Textures instead of windows obviously.

My question (yes, there's actually a question in this drivel) is: am I at risk of adversely affecting game performance and/or running low in resources if I get too nuts with the creating of many small textures? I haven't been able to find much information on how resource-tight the XNA environment actually is. I grew up in the days of 64K ram so I'm used to obsessing about resources and optimization.

Anyway, any feedback appreciated.