Texture atlas

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In realtime computer graphics, a texture atlas is a large texture "atlas" which contains many unrelated sub-textures. The sub-textures can be rendered by modifying the texture coordinates of the atlas. In an application where many small textures are used frequently, it is often more efficient to store the textures in a texture atlas which is treated as a unit by the graphics hardware. In particular, it is faster to bind one large texture once than to bind many smaller textures as they are drawn.

For example, a tile-based game would benefit greatly in performance from a texture atlas.

Atlases can consist of uniformly-sized sub-textures, or they can consist of textures of varying sizes (usually restricted to powers of two). In the latter case, the program must usually arrange the textures in an efficient manner before sending the textures to hardware. Manual arrangement of texture atlases is possible, but tedious.

See also

• Graphics pipeline

External links

• Texture Atlas Whitepaper - A whitepaper by NVIDIA which explains the technique.
• Texture Atlas Tools - Tools to create texture atlases semi-manually.
• Practical Texture Atlases - A guide on using a texture atlas (and the pros and cons).