With hardware acceleration, the watch face you apply on your smartwatch will render at a higher frame rate, which means smoother transitions and animations.
Google has updated the Wearable Support Library to version 2.7.0, which opens the door for an aesthetic upgrade for your Wear OS smartwatch. With the new update (via 9to5Google), developers can now request a hardware-accelerated canvas for a watch face. So, what does this mean for users who are rocking a Wear OS smartwatch?
Well, thanks to hardware acceleration support, the watch face you apply on your smartwatch will render at a higher frame rate. As a result, transitions and animations on a watch face will look smoother, all made possible by the arrival of hardware-accelerated canvas for developers. However, it is only available for smartwatches running Android 9 or a later build.
In order to check if your watch face is using hardware acceleration, you have to enable the “Debug GPU profiling” option from the Developers Settings. If that is indeed the case, Google says “you’ll see a new bar (moving from right to left) for each rendered frame of your watch face.” Here’s how it looks: