As far as I know you are using infiniMap from db&w GbR for your daily work. What does infiniMap do for you? Do you do flyovers? Which kind of geodata (resolution) do you use with infinMap?

I now use infiniMap Pro anytime I am mapping large images to a surface. It is such a ram saver during rendering that I can't image going back to the old way of mapping images. It is very flexible in that you can use it as a shader or as a procedural and even lets you make a low resolution proxy surface/image so you can see things in open GL. It's so great when a plug in actually works just like it's advertised! Typical images I use are 5604 x 5652 - 90 megs or so each. Some scenes have as many as 50 of these images and infiniMap Pro handles it with no problems. Render times are blazingly fast as well - an added benefit of Mike's optimized coding!