How can I preserve texture details when viewed from a distance? I'm trying to achieve a scratched surface effect using a bump map, however it turns out the surface details are not preserved at a distance:





The first picture shows the metal part at high resoltion, the second picture is a down-scaled version of it and the third picture shows the same part rendered at a distance.

This surprises me actually because Cycles obviously does supersampling for the primary rays, however it seems that it downsamples the textures on the fly or pre-calculates mipmaps instead of sampling the textures at full resolution.
It seems that Cycles does not allow to disable texture filtering as of now.

My solution is to render the scene at an insane resolution, but also to reduce the sample count by the same factor, and then downsample the result. It works very well this way.

If I haven't overlook something, I think, this is an urgently missing feature. It basically makes all textures look a little bit blurry if rendered directly at the intended resolution (because mipmapping is visually inferior to supersampling—especially for bump maps).