OpenGL: Large texture 'maps' versus multiple singular textures performance

I'm deciding if I want to create a map of multiple textures of my entire scene into several 1024x1024 texture atlases. Is it much of a gain at all to have fewer, larger textures so that you can make less GL render calls, albeit with the same numb开发者_如何学Goer of overall triangles? Is this something that's common?

In my case, I'm targeting an iPad with about a 5,000 triangle scene with 16 textures. Given the distribution I'm looking at around 5x more calls to glDrawArrays if I don't combine.