what is better: one big sprite or many small

I'm new to game programming. And i have a question. I want to have a dotted circle to be drawn on the screen. I can use one big sprite (for example 256x256 pixels) which contains all开发者_JAVA技巧 the circle or i can use many small sprites representing dots.

I use cocos2d libs and i'm able to render using batch. So what is the best way to perform such tasks ?

In my opinion your best bet (if all the dots are the same) is to have one sprite of the dot, and repeat it in the shape you are looking for.

Generally you'll want a single asset for each unique graphic. You can combine those assets into a single sprite and reuse them. This allows for more flexibility as well as speed.

Most of todays graphics hardware is optimized to texture dimensions that are a power of two. Your sprites are likely to have other dimensions. By using sprites, you can minimize the padding that is needed to fill this space (and thus, minimize CPU/GPU cycles spent on correcting this internally). Besides that, the file size will be smaller, since you need less overhead and compression is likely to be more effective.

Go with one large sprite. It's fewer calls into the rendering engine, and adds flexibility to change the look (for example, if you decide to have the circle made of dashed lines rather than dots).