   Drawing large textures
  I have recently been trying to get around drawing very large textures (5000 x 3000 bitmap images) using the DirectX ID3DXTexture and ID3DXSprite interfaces.I have gotten around to splitting the large bitmap into smaller segments (256 x 256). At the moment I am uncertain as to the best way of actually handling these smaller textures.At first I went about creating the textures (ID3DXTexture), drawing them, and releasing them every frame, but this was, of course, too slow.I have since been trying to think up better ways of obtaining the textures and drawing them, but haven't yet come up with a good solution. However, I have been reading articles from the MSDN library, and I've come accross this:"Keep the textures small. The smaller the textures are, the better chance they have of being maintained in the main CPU's secondary cache."Does this mean that if I create, let's say, 100 256x256 textures, the system will have them spread accross video and system memory? Would I have to create the textures in the Managed pool to do this? Is there a way I can know how much video card memory is being consumed at a given time?   
  All the textures should be in the managed pool, that way the driver will handle swapping the textures in and out of VRAM as needed.If you can afford it (I.e. you have enough system RAM), you should create all of the textures at startup, and just let the driver swap textures in and out of VRAM as needed. That should be pretty fast, and you can always PreLoad() textures that are about to be used (I.e. on the border of the screen, potentially going to be used soon).If you have too many textures to load them all into memory at once, you should maintain a pool of textures, and load them from disk into the texture as needed (Preferably do the load from disk in another thread).   ;  It depends on the resources available.  If there's enough room in GPU memory they will be stored there.  If there isn't the driver will swap some of them in/out when needed.  It would be nice to know more about the specific scenario.  i.e is the bitmap static, or does it change over time?