Texture atlas

In computer graphics, a texture atlas (also called a sprite sheet or an image sprite) is an image containing multiple smaller images, usually packed together to reduce overall dimensions.[1] An atlas can consist of uniformly-sized images or images of varying dimensions.[1] A sub-image is drawn using custom texture coordinates to pick it out of the atlas.

Benefits

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 single unit by the graphics hardware. This reduces the overhead of a context switch by increasing memory locality. Careful alignment may be needed to avoid bleeding between sub textures when used with mipmapping and texture compression.

In web development, images are packed into a sprite sheet to reduce the number of image resources that need to be fetched in order to display a page.[2]

References

  1. "SDK White Paper Improve Batching Using Texture Atlases" (PDF). Nvidia. Retrieved 16 October 2018.
  2. "Implementing image sprites in CSS". Mozilla Development Network.

Explanations and algorithms

Tools

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