I'm making a race circuit which is constructed using various textures.

To provide some background, I'm writing it in C++ and creating quads with OpenGL to which I assign a loaded .raw texture too. Currently I use 23 500px x 500px textures of which are all loaded and freed individually.

I have now combined them all into a single sprite/tile sheet making it 3000 x 2000 pixels seems the number of textures/tiles I'm using is increasing.

Now I'm wondering if it's more efficient to load them individually or write extra code to extract a certain tile from the sheet?

Is it better to load the sheet, then extract 23 tiles and store them from one sheet, or load the sheet each time and crop it to the correct tile?

There seems to be a number of way to implement it...

Thanks in advance.