Hardware texturing, a Maya feature that you can easily turn on or off, lets you to see approximations textures, lights and objects in your scene in a scene view.
What you see depends directly on the settings you make in the Render Settings window and per-object settings you change. What you see is not necessarily what appears in the final render, but it gives you a good idea.
To see textures, lights, and objects in a view port
Use Interactive Sequence Caching Options to load file textures into memory only once for faster interactive animation (but this uses a lot of memory).