High Res Screen Elements

how do games like UT and WarCraft 3 get their high-resolution, highly detailed elements like status bars to show up in OpenGL modes? I refer to the “dashboard” in WarCraft and the HUD and menu interface in UT, as well as similar elements in other games. If textures have a maximum size usually much smaller than screen resolution and DrawPixel calls are usually dog slow, how do they do it? I know how large images can be “tiled” with multiple textures, but even then it seems there would be some visible stretching/smushing, and yet the images are pixel-perfect!