How do you set a texture to tile in Sprite Kit

Question

I am making a sprite kit game and it is obviously more efficient to have one big SKSpriteNode with a tiled texture, than having multiple SKSpriteNodes with the tile texture. My Problem is that when I try to make a 5x5 tile using

SKTexture* tex = [SKTexture textureWithRect:CGRectMake(0,0,5,5) inTexture:[SKTexture textureWithImageNamed:@"tile.png"]];
SKSpriteNode* node = [SKSpriteNode spriteNodeWithTexture:tex size:CGSizeMake(100,100)];

The image is re sized appropriately, but it is clamped and not tiled. In openGL terms I am getting a GL_CLAMP_TO_EDGE where I want a GL_REPEAT. Is there anyway I could achieve the tiling effect of a texture in a single SKSpriteNode, without creating a very large image.

Here is an image of my problem:

Answer 1

Afaik, there is no way to create sprite with tiled texture. But what you can do, is render lot's of sprites in a single drawing pass.

From Apple's documentation (Sprite Kit Best Practices -> Drawing your content):

If all of the children of a node use the same blend mode and texture atlas, then Sprite Kit can usually draw these sprites in a single drawing pass. On the other hand, if the children are organized so that the drawing mode changes for each new sprite, then Sprite Kit might perform as one drawing pass per sprite, which is quite inefficient.

Answer 2

Apply ciaffinetile filter when creating texture.