In the alpha of my driving game I'm currently offering two texture resolution settings: (very) low, which loads textures as 64x64 (excluding any GUI textures) and normal which load them as is (resolutions varying anything from ~8x8 to 2048x2048).
I did some vehicle interior texturing this weekend and noticed then that this new texturing looks absolutely horrid on my laptop w/ low settings.
An elegant solution in my mind would be to give D3DX11_IMAGE_LOAD_INFO a flag to tell to NOT upscale any textures, which the documentation tells it will do if I were to define width and height bigger than the texture actually is. But I havent found such a flag. This is why currently I give only 0 or 64 for the width and height for the load info.
I do have some less elegant ideas which I wouldn't prefer (otherwise I guess I wouldn't have this problem this day).
I've tried searching the subject and saw some mipmap level related solutions, but seemed kind of a hassle and the solutions I saw weren't DX11 specific, and not sort of complete enough for me to understand. To be specific, I was left with an "understanding" that I would need to add new sampler(s) to the HLSL or something weird & messy like that, also the actual loading seemed like a mess too compared to what I'm doing now..
Such mess is lacking the elegancy I'm looking for here, but if it's the only way to go then sure..