Texture Atlases – Part 1 – Loving Them

Texture atlases are a great way to minimize your memory footprint when you have an Open GL application with lots of images. I ran into this when porting a game from Mac/Windows to the iPhone.

Texture atlases allow you to pack multiple images in one image allowing for multiple images to be loaded at once. This is especially true when using opengl es on the iphone, since all textures need to be square with a width/height = power of two. As a result textures need to be enlarged at run time and all the extra space is wasted memory.

The final texture atlases can be PVR compressed as well and stay compressed in memory at run time which is the ultimate memory saver.

Here’s an example of a texture atlas that shrunk > 5 MB of data down to 500K once created and compressed.

In future