you can have texture tiling in current consoles for an atlas as well. As the fragment shader can do the "wrapping" of the texture coordinate, and modern instructions also help with filtering issues at the border. But for older pipeline, ie iphone you wouldnt have that possibility. But for unique stuff nearly all platforms…
You can't do that because texture tiling is really just the effect of setting the clamp/repeat mode for coords that go beyond 0-1. If you have 100 textures that all go from 0-1, you can tile them 10x10 on an atlas, and all the texture coords just get changed based on it's textures position in the new grid. The first one is…