ustwo's design and development work with Android Wear watch faces consistently demands a high level of performance, which over the past few months has caused us to employ OpenGL directly to manage rendering and giving us finer control over rendering, memory and battery performance.

Instead of attempting to write out a whole tutorial around the challenges we faced and how we approached them, we went with the show, don't tell method. This video helps understand those advantages and the GPU's role, with a focus on shaders -- a simplified overview of how they work, their role in the context of an OpenGL rendering pipeline, and a hands-on demonstration.

It's important to note that while these learnings and principles stemmed from our work on the Android Wear watch faces, they're applicable to a multitude of platforms that have a GPU and are certainly not Android Wear (or wearables) specific.

Enjoy!

Embedded content: https://vimeo.com/209468829