Texture Atlas vs Many

Does anyone have any advice on when to use Texture Atlases, if ever? I just recently noticed that it is sometimes rather obvious when the game engine crawls and stutters when loading many or large textures, and I started having a conversation with a friend about the old timey use of Atlases.

The advantages of atlases mainly is that they use less Vram and are (possibly) faster to compute.

The disadvantage though is that they can’t be tiled, so if you have a large wall, you would have to create ‘tiles’ by way of subdividing the mesh. They also tend to be of a lower resolution because you have multiple textures on one file rather than a single large one.

I would use a texture atlas mainly for characters, where the character uses separate meshes for cloths and body parts etc and for the scenery where tiling is not really required. for example a foliage map containing textures for leafs and flowers and grasses etc on one image. you could obviously set up a tiled texture on a mesh and then bake it down to your atlas but it think that may not be always practical.

Thanks. The project (a tutorial, actually, called Bunker, don’t know the author right off but he has his video series up on YouTube) specifically requires very little use of multiple textures, but as he got deeper into it he decided to customize it a bit. He had a rather large texture he used for a painting (Vigo, I think is the name, from GB2). When he opened the door going into the room with the painting there was a rather noticable drop in frame rate or some such. I’ll pass this info along to him.

I guess what I was more curious about was whether Atlases are still used commonly. I messed with RPG Maker when I was a kid, and the concept just seems outdated today. But it starts to seem practical as you guys pointed out, depending on the application. Just wanted to make sure there weren’t better alternatives.

Also, thanks in advance to anyone else who responds.