Why not do this: Have 8 textures/images/ whatever they are, in systemRAM. Keep them there and have everything else loaded in. When you wish to load a new texture/image in, copy the texture/image over the one in VRAM. It would be one way to override dx's system of swapping textures, so you only swap when you need to.
I don't know the real practicalities of this though. Copyrect in blitz3d was fairly quick at doing this. You could even do it in smaller chunks i suppose.
EDIT[ sorry the above was went to mean 8 meg of texture/image. Why not set a limit of textures/aimges, based on the 8 MB divided by the max-size of texture/image.]
I don't know the real practicalities of this though. Copyrect in blitz3d was fairly quick at doing this. You could even do it in smaller chunks i suppose.
EDIT[ sorry the above was went to mean 8 meg of texture/image. Why not set a limit of textures/aimges, based on the 8 MB divided by the max-size of texture/image.]