say you've decided to make a chess game (i'm not, but it's a good example for this)

so you grab a nice square portion of the screen and divide it in to 8x8 tiles, coloring every other white, every other black - that's easy enough

then you want to use those fancy looking png chess pieces you've made in photoshop, but depending on the device, 1 tile on your chess board can be anything from 10x10 to 100x100 pixels without exaggerating much

so can you actually scale a bitmap without it looking like ass? is it better to upscale a small graphic or vice versa?

how is it that this should be approached?