texture requirements

One tutorial I saw once said that all images had to have dimensions that are a power of 2.

However, while in the process of optimizing my loadscreen, I accidentally stuck in a 348 by 192 tga and it worked just fine.
So, what is the deal with requiring power of two sizes? Could anyone shed some light on this matter?

if its not a power of two it gets stretched. accelerator cards, which is everything these days, only properly show textures that are powers of two.

Textures for models in Wc3 that aren't a power of 2 will appear black ingame.

So why did mine show up correctly? Do loadscreens have different rules or something?

Yeah, I also noticed that on the random occasion things that are divisible by 32 work, but not always. I wouldn't rely on it.

It apparently depends on your graphics card; while it may work fine for you, it probably won't for everyone else.

Most relatibvely modern cards shouldn't have a problem with this. It's interesting to mention people used to think cards would never support textures with powers of two dimensions, which led to some macabre trickery that went balls once crads started supporting it; case in point: Arx Fatalis.