Poll: Do you use texture atlases with ATF format?

Bink

TexturePacker, a great tool for generating texture atlases, removed support for ATF after TexturePacker version 6.0.1, because data had indicated that ATF was not being widely used by users of TexturePacker.

ATF supports GPU compression, meaning textures are uploaded and stored in the GPU in their compressed state.

The conventional PNG (and other similar conventional formats) on the other hand, while initially compressed, must be decompressed before being uploaded to the GPU and are stored in GPU memory in a completely uncompressed state.

When producing texture atlases, what image format would you still use if you could?

1. ATF

2. PNG

neuronix

ATF, we use the old png2atf.jar that adobe provided a long time ago.

Bink

neuronix

You have a .jar version of that? I have the Adobe AIR SDK 32.0 here, and the included version of png2atf is a Windows executable (png2atf.exe), which is ok for those running Windows.

I'm running Linux though...

neuronix

Sorry, an .exe indeed !

hardcoremore

I am using ATF at the moment.

It works pretty well and loads textures very fast.

I am using old version of TexturePacker because support for ATF is removed.

Shaun_Max

hardcoremore even in 2025? is there anything you are targeting in particular ? which png is not suitable ?

Bink

Shaun_Max I think PNG represents the safe option for all targets. It offers the highest quality and compatibility.

But ATF has its distinct advantages too, with its contained formats being considerably more GPU memory efficient. That also makes for quicker uploading to the GPU, and safer GPU requirements.

Shaun_Max

Bink but in 2025, i find ATF giving poor graphics, especially on high end devices.

neuronix

You can get lossless quality for ATF, with every texture format, look into the parameters.

The main upside of ATF is very low GPU memory usage, probably not useful for 95% of projects, but in some cases when you have like an isometric world with a huge amount of tiles, using ATF is the only way to go because PNG/JPEGXR eats up GPU mem very fast.

Shaun_Max

neuronix when you have like an isometric world with a huge amount of tiles, using ATF is the only way to go because PNG/JPEGXR eats up GPU mem very fast.

agreed!

neuronix You can get lossless quality for ATF

i have already tried it, but only found it useful for pixel art textures and tile based games.

hardcoremore

neuronix Exactly! ATF works very well for me and quality is practically losless. I have so much graphics that other options are not possible for me.

DrNeroCF

I just use Adobe Animate's built in spritesheet export for my main animations, and have mangled the dynamic atlas extension so I can chop up levels and build atlases with any level specific art and animation on level load.

For quality, I've found that using crunch at full quality and using dds2atf instead of png2atf for DXT5 textures is the only way to get acceptable quality with compressed textures. I still need to run the pngs through ImageMagick to fix premultiplied alpha weirdness, especially for blurred backgrounds.

The difference in loading and memory usage is night and day, but takes forever to export. It all feels completely antithetical to Flash / AIR, needing a separate process to see animation and art changes quickly. Really feels like the atlas creation / updating should be something that Animate just does in automatically on a full publish as an optimization, but alas.