I was using OpengGL (Gles2WatchFaceService.engine) for my Wear-OS watch-face projects and it was working great for years. Recently however, this engine got deprecated and therefore, before I recode all my graphics, I am reevaluating if OpenGL is needed at all.
My question to any experienced (watch face) developers here is: When should I use OpenGL for the graphics of a watch face? Only for 3D animation? What about an analog watch face with hands that should move smoothly (with the animation frame rate switching between 5 and 40 fps)? (I am also using some color blending with alpha channel, not sure if I can do that without OpenGL.)
It comes basically down to these considerations:
OpenGL for pure 2D animation could result in smoother animation at a lower CPU load. But, is this always true? Or can I get easily 40 fps for animating up to 9 graphical elements without OpenGL?
Am I getting the advantages of OpenGL (if there are any) at a cost of a more complicated code and more compatibility problems in the future (due to SW and HW updates)?
If OpenGL is the way to go, perhaps someone can point me to a good and recent code example (preferably java), because I can't find any.
Any help/comments appreciated!