Windows Screensavers Textures

Windows includes several built-in screensavers, including one that shows 3D text. In the settings dialog for the 3D text screensaver, you can select to have it render with a reflection or texture, thus giving it a metallic look. When you select either the reflection or texture settings, you can then specify a bitmap file to have Windows use that when rendering the 3D text. If you do not specify a bitmap, it still renders it with a texture using a built-in graphics file. Interestingly enough, even though the custom-text-dialog box defaults to only bitmap (.BMP) files, the built-in textures are actually JPEGs.

If you have ever wondered what they look like, you can see them by opening the screensaver file (ssText3d.scr) in a resource editor and looking in the JPG section. The two files look like this (they are identical in Windows XP and Windows 7):

Reflection texture from Windows’ 3D Text screensaver
The reflection texture has been used in some of the DirectX samples in the DirectX SDK and if I remember correctly, is a photo of the lobby at Microsoft.
Texture from Windows’ 3D Text screensaver
The generic texture looks an awful lot like those from some texture packs like Absolute Cross or Propaganda Tiles.