You really shouldn't have to worry about performance for simple sprite based 2D game. Your graphics card is capable of rendering tens or hundreds of thousands of triangles per second (or more!) which is way more than you are likely to need.
Thus, it really doesn't matter much which method you choose to use for updating sprites. If you want to have animated sprites though, I recommend you look into 3D textures. They allow you to interpolate between animation frames, which makes your animations look even better!
As a side note, you mentioned using glTranslate
which is a function from OpenGL 1.x/2.x that has been removed from later versions of the API. I recommend that you try to use "modern OpenGL" (ie OpenGL 3.x/4.x). You can find plenty of information about the differences online. That said, it is still OK to use the older versions of the API if you have a specific reason for doing so, and if you do functions like glTranslate
will continue to work.