It would reduce the number of draw calls and increase the performance of rendering, as it's simpler to render textures than polygons. Although I think you would

It would reduce the number of draw calls and increase the performance of rendering, as it's simpler to render textures than polygons. Although I think you wouldn't be able to use the same method for everything, as you'd use more vram when using textures for the effect rather than polygons. But for the case of something like coins in a Mario game, I guess it makes sense. As always, what is the right approach depends. If you want to run the game in a very memory constrained environment (early game consoles), the approach of using polygons might make more sense. But nowadays we have plenty of vram and if the entity is used a lot, 1 texture for 100s of entities makes it a worthwhile tradeoff. Edit: thank you for the corrections, I'm not heavily into game programming/rendering but am familiar with 3D/animation software, but the internals of rendering is really not my specialty so I appreciate being corrected. Cunningham's Law to the rescue yet again :)