A texture atlas, or sprite sheet, is a single image containing a number of smaller textures or sprites. This is useful as it is more efficient for the graphics card to process (it doesn’t have to keep switching textures when drawing different textures, as it can just use the single texture and sample from different parts of it). It is also faster to load into RAM, as you are only loading in one image, as opposed to several smaller ones, so the loading can be done in one stage.
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