Multitexture Terrain Ideas

Hello all, im playing around with terrain algorythms and such right now and i had some ideas i thought id throw out and hopefully have everyone critique (sp)… Anyways, they really apply to the texturing of the terrain. For instance multi texture blending while keeping in mind the need for dynamic LOD. The “standard” way it seems would be to do multiple passes (1 for each texture?) over the entire area with alpha blending… That seems to work but what about all the wasted data sent thru the graphics pipeline? IE when i have 3 texture (grass, dirt and snow) the grass would cover 80% of the land, dirt 15% and snow 5%… well we’re doing an ENTIRE pass for the snow for 5% coverage? wouldnt it be wiser to draw only peices that woudl be visible to the camera? At the same time tho how would you handle this with dynamic LOD?

Thats basically a complete dump of my brain for right now, if anyone has any good solutions to this please let them be heard, if i come across any ill be sure to do the same =)