Is it possible to override the texture filtering behavior?

Right. Note that when the texture is mapped one-to-one in texels to pixels onscreen, no filtering occurs regardless of the filter settings. When the texture is reduced, the minfilter is used, and when the texture is enlarged, the magfilter is used. So you just need to set the minfilter to mippmapping and the magfilter to linear, and you’ve got exactly the behavior you describe, automatically.

David