The correct way of handling textures?

[Anonymous Coward]

Suppose I need a certain set of textures in a scene, say 10 Mb in textures, and I know I`ll need all of them.
When and how should I load them in an OpenGL app? At the start of the app or maybe at the moment it will be displayed?

What happens if I bind 40 Mb of textures in a 32 Mb card? How is this handled internally?

Well, thank in advance for your answers...I dont know if the last question is in the OGL documentation...
maybe you can tell me where!

[Bob]

It depends on what kind of application you are writing. If speed is not so important, you can load the texture when it's about to be displayed. If speed is important, you should load them all at the same time.

And what happens if you bind more textures that you have memory is up to the driver to determine. Some texture will probably end up in the system memory instead.

[NeoTuri]

Yes, some of the textures would reside in system memory. By using the texture resident functions, you can get/set which texture objects could be in video memory.