Maybe I'm being naive. I want to load the entire image into memory, but treat it as individual images in memory, like what you'd get in a Java graphics environment?
Texture only seems to be able to load only one portion of the image from file - which means there's going to be a file-accessing bottleneck if I have to load up different portions of the image from file (yeah sure, trivial access times, but what's the improvement between loading 8+ separate image files rather than accessing the same file 8 times with additional calculation?).