Incomputer graphics, atexture atlas (also called aspritesheet or animage sprite in2D game development) 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 customtexture coordinates to pick it out of the atlas.
In an application where many smalltextures are used frequently, it is often more efficient to store the textures in a texture atlas which is treated as a single unit by thegraphics hardware. This reduces both the diskI/O overhead and the overhead of a context switch by increasingmemory locality. Careful alignment may be needed to avoid bleeding between sub textures when used withmipmapping andtexture compression.
Inweb 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]
