1024 or 512 sprites or?

Hi,

I am trying to make a mobile side scrolling car game like Hillclimber and have a question about making the terrain for the vehicle to travel over.

I have read quite a few performance topics in the forum and understand that big sprites take more memory, but you should also limit the number of sprites. I also understand that several small sprites with less collision points is better than one big sprite with lots of collision points.

Confused a bit about which is more of a performance hit, a larger sprite, or more sprites.

At present i have 1024 X 256 pixel sprites for each piece of terrain that i chain together to make the level, the screen size of the game is 1024 X 576, so there would only be one or two sprite calls per frame for the terrain... right?

So my question is (before i try and make more levels) is should I make each piece of terrain smaller like 512 X 256 or less for better mobile performance?

I just got my first smartphone a Nexus5 (yes i am a dinosaur), and i understand it has a pretty powerful processor, so the game on my phone runs just fine, i would like my game to run on maybe some less powerful phones.

Hopefully i am making some kind of sense here, many thanks in advance if someone can clarify this or has any better ideas for implementing terrain for a game like this.

I don't think it will make a huge difference in performance whether you are using a 1024 compared to a 512 one.

As you would need twice as many 512 ones, would also mean that all the stuff that have to check against the 1024, would need to do it twice if you use 512 ones.

Think the best you can do is just keep track of how much memory and cpu your game requires as you make it, and if something you add suddenly makes requirements jump, then try to remake it. If you can figure out, what limits would be acceptable for the game to run on a older mobile phone, and you just try to make sure that you stay within those limits I think you will be fine, no matter which way you do it.