Normally I guess you'd use BlendState.AlphaBlend because normally when you load your textures through the pipeline they're already premultiplied. However, if you're loading textures at runtime from PNGs or some such, you have to loop through the pixels and premultiply them, which can take a long time if you've got a lot of textures to load.

So it looks (haven't tried it) like using BlendState.Premultiplied instead of BlendState.AlphaBlend should handle non-premultiplied textures and produce the same visual result, without all the startup costs. I have to wonder if there's a non-obvious cost to doing this, like a huge drop in performance or something. Anyone know?