Does it make sense to suffer with textures?

Question

OpenGL

Hello, for educational purposes (diploma), I am writing my "engine" in OpenGL. Got to the textures. I would like to ask knowledgeable people whether it is worth creating a texture atlas and converting it to TBO in order to increase speed? Is it worth it to dodge like that, or is the game not worth the candle? I understand that this is just a diploma, but I would like to write all the same, maybe even less, but in the end I get a more or less workable concept.

Answer 1

Well look.
Firstly, why do you need TBO, did you want to have sex with mipmaps?) Yes, and they are heavier.
Secondly, the atlas makes sense if the textures are very small and there are a lot of them, i.e. speed will increase purely due to fewer IO operations. It's easier to upload a larger file once than to upload 100 small files. Nowadays, to be honest, I don’t see much point in bothering with atlases, except for situations when each texture is less than 64 pixels in size.
Look at the implementation of textures/atlases and "texture regions" in libgdx. Very simple and conveniently done. If you want just a texture, if you want to take a region from this texture (in general, those same atlases), there are also real implementations of atlases.