I have a custom application that deals with many Bitmaps tiles that are 256x256 images (png,jpg). I'm currently using the View 2d canvas and bring in all images as RGB_565. Although I'm generally happy with the applications performance, I have features I'd like to add that will require even more map tiles (Bitmaps). I've been thinking about using opengl ES 2.0 but am fairly new to it.

• Would opengl Textures be more memory efficient than keeping Bitmaps around? I assume you can load a Bitmap into a Texture and then dispose of the Bitmap

• Is it an acceptable practice in opengl to dynamically load many different Textures at runtime?

• Do you need to cache Textures or does the GPU handle that for you?