Spine animation vs sprites for large crowds

I am thinking about making a game that would involve large crowds probably around 80-100 characters on screen at once, I am trying to figure out which would be a better choice using 2d animated sprites or creating the characters using esoteric's Spine animation program. I want to have the best performance possible for mobile devices. What do you think is better?

 

Spine is not the only one programm for rigg and animate sprites.
Therefore if you want compare sprite rigged ( bone based) vs sprite sheet (images sequence based)
I prefer bone based, because for Sprite sheets animation it need pro frame a Image and it is linear.
Bonebase needs only bones data for animation. That means, minimal memory, but so much more flexibility and dynamic possibilities.

 

80-100 rigged low poly meshes, basically. You will 100% have better performance from sprites, by far, since they'll dynamically batch where possible.

There's nothing stopping you using spine for creating the animations then baking out to sprite sheet. I think it probably does that too.

But where high volume of objects is needed you'll want them batched with minimal overhead and for mobile that probably means sprites. You should test this first, yourself. It's not hard to do it.

 

Thank you that is really helpful I will definitely try testing both