If you want more fidelity than the standard texture filters can provide, you could look into writing a fragment shader that performs higher-order filtering (such as cubic). This will affect the texturing performance, though, because such a shader would need to take multiple filtered samples from the texture to produce one output. That said, the shader is not incredibly complex either so modern hardware can cope with it just fine.
The book "GPU Gems 2" (Nvidia) has further information on this.